The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family by Kathryn Trueblood Page B

corpse’s lids, dreaming about some really terrible accusatory look. And the whole family fighting over what color this kid’s eyes were.”
    It’s a good story. His voice rumbles out a rhythm and my body responds to the bass line in his voice … must be why I feel like fighting with him.
    â€œEye color’s important enough in a family to fight about.”
    â€œI know, I know,” he says, waving his ash over the bar. “Except I couldn’t determine it for these people. Here.” He’s riffling through his wallet, unstuffing it all over the bar. “Here,” he hands me a tiny portrait of a madonna and child, “that’s whose eyes I painted, icon eyes, like all the ones I could remember watching me, watching my back go out that door.” He extinguishes his cigarette by rolling the ember off the end and leaving it to die out, and he won’t look at me, determined to watch the last wisps as some ritual of wretchedness.
    I snort some of my smoke at him. “Yeah, well, I lost someone to ’Nam, his face is blurry now, all of him really, except his hands.” I remember his hands as if no one else had ever touched me .
    He turns his eyes to me, a charismatic flicker far off in the darkness, a flame I begin to walk towards across primordial cess. Then we extinguish it by looking back into our drinks.
    â€œSo,” he says, looking up abruptly and lighting another cigarette.
    â€œWhere’s your old man, old rain in the face?”
    â€œI keep him in a test tube.”
    â€œNah,” he answers, “You’re not into that cryogenics and sci-fi dry ice. Bring him back when he’s grateful, right?”
    â€œNo, I don’t want him back at all. I mean it. I had a daughter by artificial insemination.”
    He stubs out his cigarette with a lot of unnecessary mashing and says “Yeah but …” then turns to me abruptly. “It belonged to this dead guy right, the one you loved in ’Nam.”
    â€œNo, but I wished it did, sometimes I almost believed it.”
    â€œI get it,” he says, nodding not to me but the bar, “I got your number. I dialed it.”
    â€œTalking about the war. Isn’t this like carbon dating bones or counting tree rings? Seeing how far back the marks go.”
    â€œI don’t care how we do it. Carbon date me if you have to. Count the rings around my eyes. But date me. We’ll take a drive, okay?” I look at him long enough to acknowledge the question, then straight ahead. I want to see the side of his face that isn’t turned toward me, that’s reflected in the backbar mirror, but he’s onto me, looking already at us there, as though we were in another room, split-off dream doubles whose intensity and urgency is everywhere apparent. In the mirror, I can’t resist it; his face is openly waiting and hurting and blameless.
    â€œThose people,” he says, making a hook of his thumb and gesturing toward the mirror, “They want to talk to us.” But by now I’m rummaging around for more cigarettes, hunting for something ironic to say, but feeling leached of it—the urge toward irony the only bit of residue left.
    â€œHere,” he says, expertly sliding his pack on the bar so that two are exposed. “Have one of mine.”
    But in my mind we’re still moving around in the mirror-room like sleepwalkers. I imagine Heaven Hotel—a suite in the sky, silver outside our windows, a room that begins with the small pleasures of anticipating pleasure.
    â€œListen,” I say, “I came here to make myself cry. My daughter ran away. I never normally come here. I usually drink at home.”
    â€œAnd I’m messing up your plans by making you laugh?” He alternates beats with the thumb and finger of one hand against the wood. “What? You want to be alone? You want to read the paper? Here, I’ll get it for you, that’ll cheer