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Alligators May Be Present

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Chapter One

Matthew Glassman never anticipated that impregnating his wife would take so much ... well ... work. During the first eight years or so of their relationship, while they were seeking to avoid conception at all costs, Rebecca treated his semen as if it were the most potent of concoctions. Under no circumstance would she let a drop come into contact with her person.

"What, are you crazy?! They can crawl down through the skin!" she had admonished him while wiping off an opportunistic spec from her belly, a pearl he had carelessly let fly while peeling off his condom. Glassman teased his wife that she should volunteer her services to the U.S. military. If anyone could protect the troops from a toxic drop of Saddam Hussein's chemicals it was she. Becky had Glassman so wary over the ever present threat of fertilization-even while they used condoms laced with a special no-slip (and downright uncomfortable) adhesive, spermicidal jelly, and her diaphragm-that he couldn't help but think that merely one of his emissions sent along the vaginal tract, no matter how modest in volume, would yield a pregnancy during the very first attempt.

It discouraged Glassman that seemingly every other couple he knew who made an attempt at conception, no matter how avowedly lackadaisical the attempt was, succeeded with tremendous ease. Or at least this was the propaganda.

Screw all those couples who go on and on about how much fun the "trying" is. They're full of crap, Glassman decided after the sixth month of relentless and increasingly dispirited intercourse with his wife. He had always thought that the sex would get better once they were motivated by urges transcendent of the mere carnal. But this wasn't exactly how it was panning out. She was an irregular ovulator, a phrase Glassman hadn't heard of before his wife announced her gynecologist's prognosis. What this meant, in concrete terms, was that they were under strict doctor's orders to copulate as often as humanly possible.

Come on, big boy, time to do your duty, Becky would half-jokingly encourage her husband, just after their dinner and before either one of them could plea tiredness in the middle of a yawn, as much a rhetorical flourish lately as a sign of genuine fatigue.

Glassman obediently mounted his wife upon her instructions, and found the dependability of his sexual organ incredible. No matter how inured the rest of his body had become to arousal, the part of him that most counted invariably came through in the pinch. Millions of years of human evolution seemed to be on their side.

And, evidently, not on their side.

Glassman would have felt badly about his apathy were it not shared so wholeheartedly by his wife. She had begun to use their coital time to brainstorm their list of errands for the following day.

"Oh, we have to remember to call Crystal Pools about the filter," Becky had reminded her husband, working perfunctorily above her. "And," she continued, "did you pick up the cat litter liners at Publix?"

It was finally more than Glassman could endure. "Honey! In case you haven't noticed I'm trying to concentrate here!"

"Oops. Sorry. Go ahead and finish up whenever you're ready," Becky replied contritely. Glassman, however, didn't know whether to interpret the soft pat upon his rump as a gesture of tenderness or impatience.

In any case, he had just about had it with the whole project. All things considered, they hadn't really been trying long enough for Glassman to have earned the privilege of his discouragement. Perfectly healthy couples could take up to a year to conceive, or even longer, Rebecca's doctor had informed her. Still, he couldn't resist the temptation to grasp for the larger significance of their reluctant reproductive systems.

We've made a terrible mistake! We're not really cut out for parenthood! Fair warning!

Glassman was beginning to oppress his wife with his gloominess.

"Why does it have to mean anything!?" Rebecca chastised him. "Does everything have to mean something?"

Of course not, he conceded.

But there were reasons, plenty of reasons, to take stock and reconsider while they still had time. For starters, Glassman wasn't altogether certain that his genes were such hot candidates for replication.

Here I Am

Glassman was fairly certain that he had the potential to screw up a child's life through inept parenting, through good intentions gone awry. But to doom a child to a life of suffering by the sheer act of creating that life. It was too horrific a possibility to contemplate, and Glassman tried hard not to yield to the temptation.

This, however, was especially difficult for him. For Glassman knew that he had inherited a legacy of suffering himself. Not the sadness normal people suffered, but a debilitating variant that was his birthright. Depression, people called it. A lame, limp word. The economy struggled through depressions; topographical and barometric depressions marked the earth's surface and atmosphere, respectively. The dip of a typewriter key was a depression of sorts.

Glassman suffered from protracted bouts of melancholy.

Bad genes. Tainted blood. He traced his inheritance to his grandfather, Abe Fishbein, and felt that his grandfather somehow held the Rosetta stone by which he might translate his otherwise inscrutable illness. But his grandfather was in no position to offer him this translation, and Glassman sorely felt his absence. It wasn't that Abe Fishbein was dead. At least not as far as Glassman knew. Just gone. And not gone via any of the normal routes. His grandfather had eschewed all of the more conventionally scandalous modes of action for Jewish men in Lackawanna. He never gave even a passing thought to laying one harmful finger on Glassman's grandmother; he didn't run off with one of Teenie's best friends; he didn't gamble away all of their money on the ponies at Pocono Downs; to the best of anyone's knowledge, he didn't sire any illegitimate children, a crime for which Maury Luckman fled Lackawanna for fourteen years (because this, evidently, was the mandatory length of exile upon committing such an infraction); Abe didn't drink himself to death; he didn't defraud the IRS of any of the taxes he owed them from his moderately successful haberdashery. Rather, Abe Fishbein had simply disappeared. Disappeared without so much as a trace. On a Wednesday.

This was all very long ago, when Glassman was just seven years old. His parents hadn't even told him that his grandfather had vanished until he was ten or so, when it became fairly clear that Abe Fishbein would never return and that the FBI would never find him, alive or dead. Moreover, the length of his grandfather's business trip to buy rare hats in Belgium had grown suspiciously long, even to Glassman's young, gullible mind.

Even now, the details of his grandfather's disappearance remained sketchy at best. Glassman knew only as much as he could piece together from the isolated bits and snatches he had managed over the years to seize from his mother and grandmother, both exasperatingly reticent on the topic. The general circumstances seemed to imply foul play. Abe opened up the...