Oliver Benjamin
love you. I would give up everything I have.” he said.
“Even your life?” she called from the sink, fixing her messy hair
in the mirror, “Morris would kill you if he found out about this.”
“He wouldn’t. It would destroy his finely-crafted image.”
“He’d find a way.”
The corners of his mouth turned down. “I don’t care.”
“Liar,” she said, emerging again, towering before him, “You do
care.” She sat beside him on the bed and took his head between her
hands as if it were a swollen fruit. “You love life too much to throw it
all away on a stupid girl.”
“It seems that I don’t mean that much to you.”
She threw her arms around him impetuously and whispered in
his ear, “Darling. You know that of all divers, you’ve dived deepest.”
She started kissing him, licking at the corners of his mouth, softening
his hard exterior, now capitulating to her touch.
They say fruit evolved its sweetness so that its seed would be
better distributed by the hungry. So did we, Ellie knew. So did we.
But she was careful that Roy’s seed not take root anywhere but inside
her heart. She and Morris had been trying to conceive and the risk
was too great. Sliding slowly down his frame like a snake winding
down a tree, she drank from the universal ethos, tapped at the milk
of immortality.
Roy laid back on the bed at last, spent, furious at himself and
ambivalent about her.
She returned to the bathroom to brush her flawless teeth. Never
having suffered a cavity, she credited this to diligent brushing and
the antiseptic power of coffee, which she drank often and black.
Moreover, she did not want Morris to detect Roy’s semen on her
breath.
He said nothing to her as she left. She blew him a kiss goodbye.
Later, she called Roy to tell him what the surprise had been. She and
Morris had long been unable to conceive and earlier that day visited
a fertility specialist to diagnose the problem. The test results
indicated that despite Morris’ low sperm-count, they should expect
no further difficulties. She was already pregnant.
To diffuse the tension, she told him what she thought to be
another interesting bit of spurious scientific trivia: A pregnant
goldfish is called a twit.
“Goodbye twit,” he said, and hung up the phone.
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