Read Avalanche for Free Online

“Sillybilly.” A couple of months later, when Paul was on holiday, he invited me to join him in Shanghai. An invitation, an opening. What bravery. I read the email, my heart leapt, flared. All the chemicals of love spilled throughmy bloodstream . Imagine: lying in his arms again; his smell; his face softening, losing its edges. Imagine: beginning again. Standing very close to one another. Holding hands. But by morning I was trembling. Hadn’t we always been in love and hadn’t we tried, and tried, and hadn’t we never managed to make things work. So I wrote to say it would be better if I saw him when he returned. He said I was blind to the only truly great thing in my life, “Us,” and that his deep sadness was due to my doubting, my hovering, my lack of trust. Soon we were in touch again. He drafted the letter that he wished I’d written him, my mea culpa, from me to him. If I’d been able to write that mea culpa he would have forgiven me everything, he said, but as I hadn’t, he was turning away. A month later he met his new partner—or re-met, since they had known one another as teenagers. I was happy because she was older, closer to 50, and had two primary-school-age children of her own: she wouldn’t want his frozen sperm. I thought that now Paul was happy, head over heels, we could move into a kind of brotherly-sisterly après-love. They hadn’t been together long before I bumped into them at the art gallery. I saw him first, alone. He was glowing. A newshirt, new jeans, new haircut. He greeted me warmly, we hugged. Had a polite chat, parted. When I moved into the next room I watched him kneel down and raise a young girl onto his shoulders. He glanced up at me with the chill dead-eyes of a shark. The two-headed man-girl went to stand alongside a woman and her son and they gazed into a large mirror, an Anish Kapoor work, admiring a distorted family portrait. The flow of the exhibition was such that I had to walk directly past them. On the way I went up and introduced myself. Asked her for a quick word. We stepped aside. I wanted to confirm how long their relationship had been stewing. She said it was all very recent. I passed to the next space which happened to be a cul-de-sac filled with Kapoor’s Memory (2008), a gigantic rusty blimp or ordnance that obliterated the space in the room, crowded out the space, and I crawled into a tiny pocket under the sculpture, hid myself away from view, was crushed and obliterated, started quietly sobbing.
    I asked Paul again for his help. “Grow a dick,” he said in a jocular spirit. “Here’s a tip for the future: go somewhere in Southern Europe, find a bar, and just go homewith someone.” A friend said the same thing, more or less, lightly, a young guy ignorant of the odds of a 42-year-old falling pregnant naturally. The very thought of standing in a bar, at 42, going home with a drunken stranger, having unprotected sex, all with a secret and sad agenda—the suggestion filled me with horror.
    My youngest sister, who is very wise, could not understand why I was so attached to using Paul’s sperm. “It would be a disaster,” she said. “It wouldn’t be a gift. He’d hold it over you. There’s no civilized friendship. Listen to me, it isn’t like that.”
    I gave up, abandoned our child . I dropped my heart from its thin slippery sack. Let that go.
    I had an appointment with Dr. Rogers at the clinic to discuss freezing my eggs. I couldn’t help feeling ashamed to be there on my own and if he scented this shame—which I think he did—he kindly overlooked it. I would do an egg (oocyte) collection just as I would if I were doing a full cycle, only this time, without sperm, instead of immediately using those eggs to create embryos I would put them on ice. The eggs would be “vitrified,”snap-frozen. The survival rate for eggs after vitrification was about