“Do you want to talk about it now?”
In the half-light of the theatre, Fraser Jackson’s profile had the power that made me understand why Bebe had called him an African prince. “Can I trust you?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“A conflict of interests,” he said, “because of your friendship with Charlie Dowhanuik’s father?”
“Yes.”
“I need to talk,” he said, “so I’ll have to take my chances. Would you mind if we went outside? I could use a cigarette.”
On our way through the lobby we passed a display of origami and a young woman crying at a public telephone. The origami was clever, and the young woman’s tearful iteration, “I gave you five fucking months of my life,” was plaintive, but Fraser was oblivious.
As soon as we passed through the doors, he lit up and dragged deeply. When he walked over to an arrangement of large rocks that the students had designated an unofficial smoking area, I followed. Fraser chose a slab of marble large enough for us to sit on side by side. He finished his cigarette, and pulled another from the pack. He shook his head in disgust. “I don’t need this. Grabbing the nearest prop is a trick incompetent actors use when they’re trying to think of their next line. They believe it distracts the audience.”
“You have an audience of one,” I said. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
His eyes met mine. “Okay,” he said. “No tricks.” Unexpectedly, he smiled. “Did you ever hear that song ‘I Feel Ten Feet High and Bulletproof’?”
I nodded.
“From the moment Ariel told me she wanted me to be the father of her child, that’s the way I felt.”
“But you must have been surprised.”
“Any man would have been.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Of course, you are too polite to say your next line.”
“Which is…?”
“Which is that I must have been more surprised than most men would have been because I’m black.” He spread out his hands in front of him as if to check the reality of his statement. “Not tan or cafe au lait or pleasingly brown, but black – black as sin or pitch or Toby’s proverbial ass. What’s more, my features are distinctly non- Caucasian. I’m sure these sobering facts would have given you pause, Joanne.”
“Yes,” I said. “If I’d been looking for a father for my child, I would have considered the donor’s background.”
“Rightly so,” he said. “A woman would be a fool to leave such matters to chance. I’m sure you remember the old limerick students in genetics class used to help them remember Mendel’s Law. “There was a young lady named Sarkey,
And she fell in love with a darkey,
The result of her sins,
Was quadruplets, not twins,
One black and one white and two khaki.”
There was no anger in Fraser Jackson’s voice; he was travelling a path he’d been down a thousand times. Nonetheless, I found myself flinching at the old poem and eager to distance myself from its casual racism. “Fraser, if we were talking about love here, genetics would be irrelevant. I could understand Ariel falling in love with you. I could understand any woman falling in love with you. But Ariel’s decision wasn’t about love, was it?”
He shook his head and put the unlit cigarette back in the pack. “No,” he said. “What she wanted from me wasn’t love. She came to my office one Friday afternoon last February and asked if I was up for a walk. It was a crazy idea. It had been snowing all day, and the temperature was dropping. By the time we got down to the boardwalk by the bird sanctuary, the wind had come up and the snow was swirling. We were hanging on to one another’s arms and laughing like eight-year-olds. The university and the Parkway were five minutes away, but we couldn’t see a thing except one another. Ariel said it was like being inside a snow-globe. Then all of a sudden, she just stopped laughing and asked me.
“She told me I was her first choice, but if I said no, she’d find someone else. She said there would never be any obligation, financial or emotional, to her or to the baby, and that the only ‘condition’ she had was that she wanted her baby’s conception to be a natural one – no visits to the lab for sperm donations; no sexual encounters dictated by basal thermometer temperatures. She wanted us to make love on a regular basis until she became pregnant.”
“And you agreed.”
“I was honoured.”
“But she stayed with Charlie all the time you and she were…”
“That wasn’t the plan,” he said tightly.
“Then why did it happen that way?”
“Charlie,” he said, and it was hard to imagine how a single word could be infused with such contempt. “Your friend Howard’s son is a consummate games player.”
“In what way?”
Fraser shook his head. “He made her the centre of his life. For a woman like Ariel, that was a heavy obligation. Whenever she tried to leave, there were threats.”
“He threatened her…”
“That would have made her choice easy. No, Joanne, he threatened to kill himself. She couldn’t leave.”
“But she did leave. Two weeks before she died, she moved out…”
“It was after she saw the ultrasound photograph of the baby. Seeing our child made us both realize there were larger obligations.”
“Did Charlie know about the baby?”
“Watching a woman as closely as he watched Ariel – I don’t see how he couldn’t have.”
“Fraser, did it ever occur to you that one reason Ariel chose you to father her baby might have been to prevent Charlie from convincing himself the baby was his.”
“I’m not a stupid man, Joanne. The thought occurred to me. I also realized that Ariel wanted to make her decision irrevocable. That didn’t make me love our child any less.”
He stood and took out his cigarette pack, but instead of lighting up, he arced the package through the air so that it landed in a garbage bin ten metres away. “At least I can do this for them,” he said.
I watched him walk away a big man who, for a few magical, ardent weeks, had been ten feet tall and bulletproof. But even as Fraser Jackson had gloried in his good fortune, there had been a silver bullet waiting. As I rose to walk back to my office, my limbs were heavy, made leaden by the weight of evidence that seemed to link Charlie Dowhanuik to the sequence of events that had resulted in the deaths of Ariel and her baby. Whether or not to convey what I’d learned to Howard Dowhanuik was no longer an option, but it wasn’t going to be easy to tell my old friend what I had learned about his son. I needed time and quiet; what I got was Kevin Coyle in full manic mode.
As he approached me from the hall outside his office, his eyes glittered huge and intense through his thick glasses, and his grin, a dentist’s nightmare of ancient silver fillings, was fearsome.
“You look like you’ve been mainlining locusts and honey,” I said.
“A Biblical allusion,” he sneered, “and as such, increasingly irrelevant. Who needs God now that we have the Internet? Come have coffee, and I’ll show you my new toy.”
I followed Kevin into his office. He poured our coffee – mine into the orange and brown striped mug that was apparently now reserved permanently for me. He gestured to the low tables that had once held his prized games of Risk. The board games were gone now, replaced by a high-end computer system with all the bells and whistles.
I sipped my coffee. “Impressive,” I said.
“The coffee or the Complete Home Office?” he asked.
“Both.” I raised my cup to him. “Kevin, I have to hand it to you. When you commit, you commit.”
He caressed his seventeen-inch monitor. “The whole world appears on this screen,” he said solemnly. “Anything I want to learn about, buy, own, peruse, discuss – it’s all here for me.”
“Eden,” I said.
