Gone Girl

perched in front of the sink and swallowed her pill. For three years she did this everymorning, 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 – Let’s do this, Amy, let’s have a baby – and she said no. I was expecting nervousness, caution, worry – Nick, will I be a good mom? – but I got a clipped, cold no . A no without loopholes. Nothing dramatic,no big deal, just not something she was interested in anymore. ‘Because I realized I’d be stuck doing all the hard stuff,’ she reasoned. ‘All the diapers and doctors’ appointments and discipline, and you’d just breeze in and be Fun Daddy. I’d do all the work to make them good people, and you’d undo it anyway, and they’d love you and hate me.’
    I told Amy it wasn’t true, but she didn’t believe me. I told her I didn’t just want a child, I needed a child. I had to know I could love a person unconditionally, that I could make a little creature feel constantly welcome and wanted no matter what. That I could be a different kind of father than my dad was. That I could raise a boy who wasn’t like me.
    I begged her. Amy remained unmoved.
    A year later, I got a notice in the mail: The clinic would dispose of my semen unless they heard from us. I left the letter on the dining room table, an open rebuke. Three days later, I saw it in the trash. That was our final communication on the subject.
    By then I’d already been secretly dating Andie for months, so I had no right to be upset. But that didn’t stop my aching, and it didn’t stop me from daydreaming about our boy, mine and Amy’s. I’d gotten attached to him. The fact was, Amy and I would make a great child.
    The marionettes were watching me with alarmed black eyes. I peered out my window, saw that the news trucks had packed it in, so I went out into the warm night. Time to walk. Maybe a lone tabloid writer was trailing me; if so, I didn’t care. I headed through our complex, then forty-five minutes out along River Road, then onto the highway that shot right through the middle of Carthage. Thirty