Read Online The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family by Kathryn Trueblood - Free Book Online Page A

counter towards him.
    He glances at the black plastic ashtray full of my mother’s lip-marked butts and asks, “Mind if I smoke?”
    â€œGo up in flames, for all I care.” He laughs and looks at me like he isn’t going away before I admit that I like him.
    Where the mouth of the Columbia River gapes widest, a thousand boats have gone down. That’s where I take him. There are lumpen, grass covered islands half a mile long in the river. Flocks of birds rise from the reeds, fall into the reeds. Underwater, the islands become sand bars. We climb in silence to the lighthouse that stands on the humpbacked promontory of the cape. I resist the urge to ask him any questions about himself. I imagine that he expects questions; that his answers are all script. I know nothing yet of the way his mind plays. He smokes a pipe and the tobacco smells like cognac and chocolate. The smell of luxury, travel, perpetual discontent. I am determined to observe more about him than he would have me know, and I think he senses it. I think it gives him a kind of pleasure.
    I act the tour guide. I tell him about the first ship bearing a great glass bell in its hold, the one that went down in the 1840s. And about the gradeschool stories of a beacon that burned beneath the breakers. But I stop there. My mind always fills in the picture with a convocation of willowy gnawed shapes in a half-light dancing and sharks skimming between. My mother peopled the sea with immortals in an effort to turn me from a childish preoccupation with decay and dying—Poseidon and his trident, Bottocelli’s Venus in her shell—but I only mixed the images indiscriminately, forming a court of the deep where immortals held forth and the dead talked until their jaws fell away. When we come to the sharp escarpment that faces south, we stand awhile.
    â€œBones and shells roll across them together,” he says, nodding towards the sandbars. I back into him awkwardly as I step away from the edge.
    He leans down and makes the scary wind-noise that children make. Weeeeee — yeeeeew . Long and sing-song against my neck. I turn to run up the hill, and the wind lifts my hair, whips strands of it into his mouth.
    The lighthouse extends skyward from a platform of fenced-in flat, while all around ascent or declivity immobilizes hardy picnicers who watch their thermos bottles fly off cliffside and their hard boiled eggs tumble into tangles of madrone and red cedar. “I love slants,” I shout, my words torn in streamers from my mouth. But he has heard me. He comes up close alongside me then, saying, “Show me how you love,” and he watches my face for the telltale hesitation he hopes to find. I falter but it doesn’t embarass me because I’m no innocent. I make a gift of it. I smile when I see how he enjoys this brief admission of attraction. Then I invite him to lie in the grass with me beneath the lighthouse. He doesn’t hesitate at all.
    With our feet downhill and our heads tilted back, the huge black and white cylinder tilts against the sky as though we had caught the moment just before its fall from the cliff and crescendo below. Then we lie with our feet uphill, and the blood pouring down into our heads swells our eyelids, and the turret tilts towards us, filling the whole frame of our view as though it were falling right onto us. We listen to the boats sounding the first and fifth of a chord and buoy bells between, the notes lengthening in the moist air like the slowing of my heart. Gusts of wind travel up the cliff and fold over the headland, mixing the stench of the cormorant rookeries with the sweetness of new grass. Acid and salt, that which has passed into the gullet alive and died on the way down, the smell is sharp and merciless as first desire.
    Nigel’s apartment in Los Angeles is grand, parquet floors and built-in china cabinets with beveled glass doors and a cupola for a breakfast nook. The windows are