A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories by Ron Carlson Read Free Book Online Page B

“They’re not all going the same way,” I said. “Which is the right direction?”
    It was a little joke, but the doctor said, “They’re not supposed to. Do you see the ones with two tails?”
    I bent to the eyepiece again and, after a moment I did see a couple of two-tailed sperm whipping around.
    “Is that normal?”
    “Sure.”
    “Well,” I said, when the doctor was silent, “How does it look?”
    “Normal. The sperm are alive. The medium is hospitable.” To Story he said, “Call my office Monday and schedule a histogram early next month. I’ll be back then.”
    TWO
    SINCE IT was Sunday, there were Township Cocktails that night, this time at Annette and Hugo Ballowell’s place on the big lake, Mugacook, right across from the college. It had been a long day, but Story was mayor of the town and there would be some skating on the lake later, so we went down.
    It was at Township Cocktails at the Ballowells that February night that I first had a glimpse of what the next four months would hold for us. It was that night that I first saw the solution, the radical answers to this baby thing, though I didn’t know it at the time, and it was that night when I came to understand there was a little more to the world than Dr. Binderwitz, even from his intellectual stratosphere, could see.
    I don’t really know how it happened, the specific point where I left my senses for . . . my senses. I was in a mild funk that had been solidifying over the last year or so as my painting dried up. McOrson was still selling a few every month in New York, but they were old paintings, some of them over two years and they were the skies, the landscapes at which I had become facile, and which I had come to loathe. The reality was simple: I wasn’t painting and it hurt. So I wasn’t really in a party mood, especially with all the driving, two hours to New Haven, two hours back, and now: cocktails.
    Story dressed and drove us down and we ran into Gil Manwaring, the constable, on Foundry Road along the fish pond and he and his two men were parking cars. Story said no thanks and we parked it ourselves and walked four hundred yards in the icy brown dusk, carrying our skates.
    The Ballowells’ house is the biggest on Mugacook, the kind of place mistaken for an inn by forty cars every summer. Story and I immediately ran into Ruth Wellner, the county attorney, who had been a classmate of Story’s in Boston and who was now Story’s best friend in Bigville. Ruth and Billy were our age, and were in the first stages of chasing a baby down themselves. Ruth wanted children almost as much as we did, but she couldn’t admit it. She played devil’s advocate. Ruth used to challenge me: “You want children; you have them.” She’d go on: “Why do we want kids? What are we going to do with children? Every time we want kids, we ought to get in the car and drive down to K Mart in Torrington. Stay half an hour and we’ll get more parenthood than we bargained for.”
    Billy, whom I liked a lot and who is living proof that insurance agents are human beings too, sat on the arm of the couch wearing an expression the most prominent feature of which was its profound sperm-loss pallor. I winked at Billy and he nodded back stiffly, a gesture he’d seen a battle-weary soldier make in some World War II movie. I admired his courage and Ruth’s. The feature of Clomid we all found most unique was the headache each dosage inspired, making intercourse impossible, an irony lost on the chemists.
    There is something about women on fertility drugs, something I admire, I suppose, something that gives them an aura: larger than life. It’s hard to explain, but it would be easy to paint. I stood to the side a little as Story and Ruth fell to rapt conversation, their voices the rich female timbre that by its very sound says: hey, we’re calm here; something mature is transpiring. They could have been talking about the township or about the mysteries of estrogen; it