She touches her stomach again. The baby-yet-not-yet-a-baby beneath her hand. He remembers hearing that a fetal pulse is detectable at four weeks. He remembers that she has miscarried before. The quiet pain of that. It hurts to think about what she might be going through. “You told me you were sterile and now I’m pregnant,” she says. “Now the only thing you have to tell me after my doctor’s confirmation—that you asked for—is that your testicles are atrophied? This is not how most men react to finding out they are a potential father.”
Father. Spoken from the mother. She lets go of his hand, and picks up her manila folder, then examines the papers herself now, avoiding eye contact as she goes on.
“This is definitely not how I’d expect you to act if you truly believed it wasn’t possible. Happiness, fear, joy, anger, whatever. But your level of surprise is like if we got dinner reservations somewhere you thought you couldn’t get on short notice. Can you explain to me what is happening in your head?”
Ames inhales. Waits. Exhales now. She’s waiting. Expecting him to say something, do something. That’s who he is now, he reminds himself, someone who makes decisions, who doesn’t let life just act upon him. Wasn’t that the big lesson of transition, of detransition? That you’ll never know all the angles, that delay is a form of hiding from reality. That you just figure out what you want and do it? And maybe, if you don’t know what you want, you just do something anyway, and everything will change, and then maybe that will reveal what you really want.
So do something.
And maybe he couldn’t have picked a better spot than his office to tell her—he’d always thought it would happen over dinner at some place where they’d be stuck discussing it. But in view of the office kitchenette? At work? This is the one place where she couldn’t freak out, where she’d have to at least feign chillness.
His silence draws out. Finally, Katrina makes a gesture with her hand, flipping up her palm, like, What?
Just say it.
So he does. “I was told that I was sterile by the doctor who gave me estrogen. I injected estrogen and took testosterone-blockers for about six years, when I lived as a transsexual woman. He told me I’d be permanently sterile after six months. So, like, given my past as a woman, fatherhood is a lot for me to handle emotionally.”
“I’m sorry, you lived as a what?” Expression drains from her face.
“I was a transsexual woman. That’s why I thought I was sterile.” He reaches out to her shoulder, to steady her. He’s about to ask if he can tell her everything.
A quick jerk of her arm out from under his touch, and her file of vasectomy reports and the pregnancy test flies at his face. Instinct bobs him a quick step to the side. The manila folder glances against his shoulder, opens, and printouts scatter.
He wants to soothe her, to try to touch her again—but she nimbly hops to her feet. “I can’t believe this. I feel, god, I feel—” She can’t seem to speak, and instead brings her hands to her collarbone as if to push out the words that have gotten caught. “Deceived! You deceived me. Why would you do this to me?”
He has enough experience with coming out to know that insisting he wasn’t doing anything to her would only escalate the moment. Instead, he fights an impulse to stoop and gather the printouts back into their folder. The Reddit forum printouts now seem more glaring, more deviant than if she had tossed all five months’ worth of their selfies and sexts. Still, he doesn’t move. She’s standing with one shoulder forward now, like a boxer, and although it’d be completely out of character, he’s not sure that if he leans down, she won’t pop him in the eye. But then, abruptly, she startles, and whirls.
Josh, from the biz dev department, stares at them through the glass partition. When Katrina catches him gawking, he leans toward the kitchenette and snatches an apple from the wire basket hanging by the door. But he can’t help himself, and turns back to regard the office diorama through the glass. He gives Ames a quick yikes, bro face. Katrina stares at Josh. She’s visibly upset, her in-control-boss demeanor still largely disassembled.
“Hello, Josh,” Katrina says curtly through the glass. Josh is so enthralled by the scene that he doesn’t seem to notice a break of the fourth wall. Decisively, she takes two steps, ignoring the scattered printouts, and opens the door. From the hallway, she spins and glares at Ames. “Can you please pick up that file I dropped”—she points at the papers scattered on the floor—“and bring it by my office in about an hour? I’m late for a call right now. But we can discuss this further then.”
“Of course,” Ames says. “Can’t wait.”
Ames stoops to gather the papers. Josh waits until Katrina has rounded the hallway corner, leans in the door left wide open by her exit, tosses the apple in the air, catches it, and smirks down at Ames. “Lover’s spat?” Josh asks.
* * *
—
“Your fountain of youth doesn’t seem to have run dry yet,” observes Ames, sneaking a look at Reese’s face as they move into a shady eddy in the slowly drifting current of idlers taking in the April sun of Prospect Park.
She looks to him much as she had in her twenties. In fact, she’s softer even—in her lavender-and-white-checked dress, she flaunts that pear shape that women’s magazines identify as a body type one must dress carefully to flatteringly de-emphasize, but that Reese always not-so-quietly prized as a marker of uncommon passibility.
His own period of softly estrogenated vampire skin had slowed the onset of cracks and furrows, but when his skin roughened again and the stubble poked through once more, a few gray scouts had camped among the darker hairs. He had carefully shaved them this morning. Both as a man hiding any signs of aging before he sees an ex for the first time in years, and confusingly, out of a dormant sense of competitiveness, an urge to show himself off as still a beauty.
“Your own estrogen levels seem to have run low,” Reese says, but without much venom, like she’s too tired for niceties, rather than really trying to hurt him.
“I’m told my crow’s feet are dashing.”
Reese sighs. “I don’t want to talk about how you look, Amy. I’m not going to do that.”
“Of course. That’s fair.” He ignores the “Amy” part. The name doesn’t offend him, it’s just a name no one says anymore. “I just wanted you to know you look great.”
Reese shrugs, then licks the edge of the ice cream sandwich he had brought her.
Her disinterest surprises him. He had figured on the compliment mattering to her.
“Hey,” he says, affecting a light tone, “I’m putting myself out there, admitting how great you look.”