Eva’s use of the pronoun I as opposed to we was not lost on me. Nor was the fact that Eva always seemed to refer to my mother when the subject of marriage came up and never to us.
Dr. Fukomara smiled and walked closer to the table. “And you?”
“What’s that?” I asked, having missed his question.
“Are you having second thoughts?”
“Do you have kids?” I asked.
“Three boys,” he said. “We sent our last off to college in September. We’re officially empty nesters. We can run around the house naked and have sex in any room.”
“Do you?” I asked.
His smile waned. “How old are your children?”
“I don’t have any,” I said, which seemed to give him pause. He fixed me again with that inquisitive look. I was just thirty-two. Eva was three years older, a pilot for Alaska Airlines committed to her career and uncertain she wanted children, though apparently very certain she did not want mine—hence, my shaved groin and decision to end my chance to be a father.
“And you think you still might want to?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t think I did. I’d told myself as much for most of my adult life, but now at the moment of decision, I was no longer so certain.
Dr. Fukomara nodded. “Listen, I schedule these at the end of my day. I have another patient in the room next door. Think it over. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.”
But even after Dr. Fukomara had left the room, I could not think it over, not with my past continuing to invade my present. The first recollection started as a trickle that, as soon as I attempted to block it, found another path to weep through, the way water will always bleed through concrete, no matter how many times you patch it. I was recalling a particular moment on an unusually hot summer day when I’d sat beside my father in the shade of a two-hundred-year-old oak tree. It had become our routine to sit in the shade provided by those gnarled branches and broad leaves, my father listing in his wheelchair. I don’t remember much else about that day or even the topic of conversation, but I do remember his words.
“There comes a time in every man’s life,” he’d said in the halting, ghostly voice his stroke had left him, “when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.”
I recall thinking my father too young to be imparting such wisdom, despite his infirmity, and I too young to be receiving it. Now, sitting in Dr. Fukomara’s office, I wondered if I had already reached that time in my life. The thought frightened me, because I had done very little to leave a mark on this world. My death would be noted with nothing more than a headstone bearing the dates of my birth and my death to let the world know I had been here.
I am the only son of an only son. My father’s lineage will end with me.
And as that thought weighed on me, I decided, for no rational reason, that I hated that room with its mustard-yellow walls and poorly disguised cheap pressboard cabinets. I slid off the table and paced the orange linoleum, imagining what Eva might say when she arrived home from her East Coast flight to find I had changed my mind.
“We talked about this,” she’d say. “We agreed.”
But saying “we agreed” was akin to saying the French and British agreed to give Germany most of Czechoslovakia at the Munich Conference. I had grown weary of Eva’s complaints about how condoms numbed the pleasure for her and how a vasectomy was the least intrusive and most effective form of birth control—for her, certainly. But she was not the one facing the blade, or worse, a possible fire and Dr. Fukomara’s beating fists.
My eyes wandered to the stainless-steel metal stand and the gleaming forceps, tweezers, and scalpels. The two mountains of gauze seemed far more than necessary given the small task to be performed. And I again thought of my father, who had never had to make this decision. I knew what he would have said if I had ever confided in him about this trip to the doctor. My father would have said what he always said when my actions dumbfounded him, the same four words he uttered the very first moment he’d laid eyes on me and unwittingly bestowed upon me my name.