1
1989
Burlingame, California
The bells sounded so clear they caused me to sit up, though intuitively I knew I could not have heard them in that sterile, cramped doctor’s office.
“Everything okay?” Dr. Kenji Fukomara peered at me over his glasses, an inquisitive gaze.
It was an interesting question given my circumstances. I sat on a narrow examination table, one sheet of thin paper crinkling beneath me and a second sheet draped over my naked lower half. That morning I’d shaved my groin in anticipation of my vasectomy, a task in which I had taken great care. During an earlier consult, Dr. Fukomara told me a story of how a particularly hairy patient caught fire during the cauterization, and the doctor immediately commenced to beat at the flames. Urban myth, probably, but the image of Dr. Fukomara pounding my groin with his fists had caused me to be precise.
So instead of asking if he, too, had heard the church bells, I said, “Can we wait a minute?”
“It’s perfectly natural to be nervous,” Dr. Fukomara said. He stood at a stainless-steel sink scrubbing his hands with disinfectant soap and rinsing them beneath a stream of hot water.
“I just need a moment.” I sat up farther, the paper beneath me protesting.
The bells had sounded exactly like those that rang in the steeple of Our Lady of Mercy, the Catholic church just blocks from my boyhood home, which made me think of my mother, whom I always considered more infallible than the pope when it came to Catholic ideology. Though I was no longer a practicing Catholic, the remnants of her steadfast tutelage, like those bells, still occasionally rang loud and clear. Catholic guilt, they call it; my mother would have chastised my decision to get a vasectomy as a violation of a church tenet.
“Is there something in particular, some concern?” Dr. Fukomara asked, drying his hands with a coarse brown paper towel.
“I wish there was,” I said. “Something particular, I mean.”
“You won’t have any change in sexual function.” He’d given me the same assurance in our consult. “And you’ll still be able to pee like a racehorse”—as well as the same joke. Dr. Fukomara smiled easily. Humor was his technique to put his patients at ease, a necessity when your specialty involved cutting other men’s scrotums. The week before, when he walked into that same room for my fifteen-minute consult, he’d held a machete and had donned Coke bottle–thick, magic-store glasses. “This won’t hurt a bit,” he’d deadpanned.
“Is it your wife?” he asked. “Is she having second thoughts?”
“Oh no, she’s very sure,” I said, though Eva was not my wife. Eva and I lived together in the house I’d bought two blocks from the church I no longer attended with the steeple bells I no longer heard except at odd moments, like that one.
Eva moving in with me had seemed like a good idea at the time, but as the months had passed, our living arrangement had started to feel like it was more for convenience than love, which, ironically, was how I had pitched her the idea. “You won’t have to pay rent,” I’d rationalized. “And we’ll save on utilities and groceries and other incidentals.” It was all very practical.
“What about your mother?” had been Eva’s reply.
From my mother’s perspective, Eva and I were living in sin. She’d never used those words, but she’d also not set foot in my house from the moment Eva did, and on those rare occasions when the three of us got together, usually for dinner at a restaurant, my mother was cordial but never asked about the details of Eva’s and my relationship. Neither did I. Eva and I had discussed marriage, but always in vague terms that also usually provoked a reference to my mother.
“I won’t get married just to appease her,” Eva had said. “And when I do, it won’t be in a Catholic church, either.”