a long way from Ohio,” and Ed says, “We’ve all come a long way, eh?” and he tells Jack Bail that he’s from B.C. but that Fran is a Maritimer and Maritimer women always return home eventually and you’d have to be crazy to stand in the way of a Maritimer woman.
Fran says very attentively, “Your wife can’t be with us, Jack?”
“No, Chris is not able to come,” Jack Bail says.
“Maybe next time,” Fran says. Chris somehow catches my eye without looking at me and somehow rolls her eyes without rolling them. Or so I imagine.
“Unfortunately we’re currently separated,” Jack Bail says.
This gives everyone pause. “I’m sorry to hear that,” Ed says. Jack Bail says, “Yep, it’s not an ideal situation.”
Now Chris gets up and says, “We have assorted berries, and we have—chocolate cake. Jack’s favorite.”
“Do you have children, Jack?” Fran asks, which is surely a question whose answer she can figure out by herself. “We don’t,” Jack Bail says. “A couple of years back, we tried. You know, the IVF thing. Didn’t work out.” I’m refreshing the tableware at this point. Jack Bail says, “As a matter of fact, I just got this letter from the clinic demanding nine hundred dollars for my sperm.”
This silences even the Joyces.
Jack Bail continues, “So three years ago, as part of the whole process, we froze sperm. Yeah, so anyway, we go through the whole thing, an ordeal I guess you could call it, and this and that happens, and we forget all about the frozen sperm. Now here’s this invoice for nine hundred bucks because they’ve stored it all this time—or so they say. I call them up. I speak to a lady. The lady says they’ve sent letters every year informing me that they’re holding my sample. Letters? I don’t remember any letters. But first things first, right? Destroy it, I tell her. Get rid of it right away. She tells me that they can’t do that. First they need a notarized semen disposition statement.”
“OK, here we go,” Chris says. “Jack’s cake. And berries for anyone who might be interested.”
“Now, I know their game,” Jack Bail says. “I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to mail them the notarized statement and they’re going to say they never got it. And they’re going to make me go to a notary all over again and they’re going to make me mail them another statement and they’re going to drag this thing out. And every extra day they store it, they’re going to charge more, pro rata. See? They’re literally holding my sperm hostage.”
“Corporations,” Ed says. “Fran, doesn’t that—”
“Exactly,” Jack Bail says. “It’s not that the employees are evildoers. It’s the corporate systems. When it comes to receiving mail they don’t want to get, mail that reduces their profits, their systems are chaotic. When it comes to billing you, their systems are never chaotic. And I mean: retaining my genetic material without my consent? It’s insanely wrong. So—do you ever do this?—I tell her I’m an attorney and that I’ve got a bunch of hungry young associates who’ll be all over this shakedown like a pack of wolves.”
Ed says, “That would blow up in your face in Canada. We’re—”
“In the U.S. it’s different. In the U.S., you don’t register on their systems unless you threaten a lawsuit. That’s how they operate. Human reasonableness is just seen as an opening to make more money. So I said to Chris, Do you recall us ever getting a letter about a frozen sperm sample? She’s like, I don’t know, all those letters look the same. I’m like, Wait a minute, this is important, I want you to think hard. She’s like, I can’t do this, I’ve got to keep my eye on the ball. I’m like, What ball? This is the ball. I mean, think about it. My genes are in the hands of strangers. Never mind the nine hundred bucks. We’re talking about my seed. For all I know, I could have children out there in the world right now. Offspring. It’s far from impossible, right? Mistakes happen all the time. And foul play. People think that foul play doesn’t really exist. They’re wrong. Foul play is a very real thing, especially when there’s money to be made. Believe me, I know.”
Nobody has made a start on the cake or the assorted berries. I say to Jack Bail, “You’re right to be concerned. You have to take care of this.”
“That’s what I did, Doc. Cut a long story short, I caved on the nine hundred bucks and I went to the clinic personally with the documentation. I made sure to get a receipt.”
“That was smart,” Chris says.
Jack Bail says, “I had no option: I got a letter from a debt collection agency. I had to cave. What was I going to do, risk my credit over nine hundred bucks? No, I had to cave. And I don’t even know if they’ve actually disposed of the semen. I’ve got to assume they have. But I’ll never know for sure, will I?”
Jack Bail spends the night on our sofa. In the morning, when Chris and I go down, there is a thank-you note.
Then a year passes and with it a tax season, and we are walking on the beach, and I stop and I say to Chris, “You know what? We haven’t heard from Jack Bail.”
Our beach is a sand and shingle beach. The sand is a common blend of quartz and feldspar. The sand emerges from the ocean, so to speak, and continues inland until quite suddenly shingle replaces it. The shingle, or gravel, consists at first of pebbles, next of a mixture of pebbles and cobbles, and finally almost only of cobbles. This progressive distribution of the beach stones, apparently methodical, is in fact natural: a storm’s waves will force rocks small and large landward, but retreating waves have less power and will move only smaller rocks seaward. The result is a graduated stranding of the rocks, which amass in a succession of steep slopes and berms. Our beach walk begins by scrambling down one berm and then a second, and I always take care to hold Chris’s hand as we go down. Countless large spiders somehow make a life among the cobbles, and my job is to help Chris to put them out of her mind. Out of my mind, too. There are no leg-bugs out here. Leg-bugs are deer ticks. Every evening from May through November, Chris and I must examine each other for ticks. Sometimes we find one.
From the sand beach, the brown drumlin cliffs are exposed to our contemplation. The drumlins have been here since the Wisconsin glaciation. Their crosscut formation is the result of erosion by the ocean and the wind and the rain, a battering that is ongoing, I can testify after two winters here. As the hills retreat, they leave behind rock fragments that will, in due course, form part of the beach. This sort of fact is difficult for me to really understand; it must be said that much of my newly acquired geological knowledge is basically vocabularistic. I can’t recognize feldspar, for example, or a granitic boulder. The Wisconsin glaciation isn’t something I’m really on top of.
Chris and I scan the water, instinctively, I suppose. Sometimes we’ll see a seal’s head. It disappears for a while, then surfaces once more. They have large, cheerful, dog-like heads, these seals. It would feel good to see our warm-blooded kin out there today: this is one of those strolls when the up-close ocean daunts me more than a little, and as we skirt dainty rushes of water, I sense myself situated at the edge of an infinite and relentless eraser. I’m not sure that there’s much to be done about this: awe, dread, wonder, and feelings of asymmetry come with the terrain. There must be something appealing about it, or we’d be elsewhere. Where, though? It’s places that are going places. This part of Nova Scotia, the paleogeographers tell us, was once attached to Morocco.
“I hope he’s OK,” I say to Chris.
“I imagine
