Ms. Conception

One popular topic of conversation for me was asking him the same thing over and over again. “What are you doing here? Why have you stayed?” I liked to needle him, to constantly challenge him. “I do not understand how you reconcile this sojourn with me and your fundamental beliefs,” I said, sitting against him on the banquette in the hotel’s Victorian dining room.
“I’m in the throws of a moral struggle,” he told me seriously.

“A moral struggle?”

“You don’t understand? I am a very spiritual person,” he said to me. “I’m testing myself.”

That night he flunked the test.

Steve walked into my little room unannounced. He didn’t bother to knock. The room had only one window facing onto a wall, like a New York hotel room. The bathroom was down the hall. In the same way that spring and summer were compressed up there in Alaska, in this tiny hotel room, now so were we.

He sat down on a chair opposite the opaque glass door. Here was a man who didn’t believe in birth control sitting in my room in the middle of a primordial rainforest. I was starting to wonder if God was testing me.

“I’d like to stay,” he said.

“It’s the salmon.”

“What?”

“The salmon. The spawning salmon.”

“What?”

“What if I get pregnant?”

“I would like to have as many children as possible,” Steve said.

“What about your wife?”

“The idea of seeing the variety of children with different women is intriguing.”

” You’d want to know?”

“No.”

“But you would know. I’d tell you. Would you ask me to get an abortion?”

“No.”

“Then what are you doing here?” I shouted. “If I am ever going to have a kid, I have to start now. You can’t trust me out here with all the salmon running upstream.”

I had given him fair warning.

“There is only one problem. The kid needs a dad,” Steve said, stroking my hair.

“There’s no time for a dad.”

“Don’t have a kid on your own,” he said, grabbing my chin, looking at me.

“Why not? You are the one who says how wonderful, how important it is.”

“A kid needs a father.”

“The world reproduces. Every living thing.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t believe in birth control? Is that correct?”

“True.”

“You don’t agree with abortion?”

“True.”

“And you have left your room to come here and say you want to stay with me?”

“Yes.”

“But you tell me that as a grown woman with some resources and lots of intelligence, that I am not allowed?”

“A kid needs a father.”

He paused and looked at me, touching me, fingering the LL Bean pink long underwear shirt of his that I was wearing. He had already given me that much to take home.

“By travelling with you, I’ve opened the door,” he said. “I never expected to care for you this much. When I opened the door, I thought it would not make a difference. But it does. I feel very torn.“

I picked up my bear bell from the night table and gave it a shake. It tinkled, like a pint-sized church steeple, the kind whose peel marks time and announces weddings, marks deaths and some times even births.

“A small souvenir of Alaska,” I said, handing it over.

He didn’t blink.

“I ‘ll let you know if there will be any others,” I said.

“You will need this after I’m gone,” he said, shaking the bell.

“I have no intention of coming between a mama bear and a cub,” I said.

“The fact is,” said Steve, putting his arms around me, and pulling me towards him, “Neither do I.”