A Dip in the Gene Pool

There was nothing else to be done. It was two in the morning, you see, none of us had had any sleep and my housemate wanted me out of his bed. It was time to make a list. Mark that’s my housemate suggested it in that long suffering tone he affects in the middle of the night. His partner, Paul, scrabbled on his nightstand and produced paper and pen without actually opening his eyes. I wrote:

REASONS NEVER TO GO OUT WITH MEN AGAIN

They both sighed. I couldn’t do that, they told me (while I argued and wheedled and cited examples). I couldn’t write a list like that in the middle of the night. It wasn’t right.
This was one of life’s great decisions, Mark said. And at least, muttered Paul, a hand over still closed eyes, it ought to be approached with adult sensibility. But then he opened his eyes slightly, surveyed me, and giggled.
“Okay, who am I kidding?” he said.
I maintained a hurt silence. Mark sighed again. He swept his eyes heavenward and started with the high pitched hum which always signalled the emergence of his high drama queen persona. Finally it was decided we would settle for at least the appearance of neutrality.

PROS
Good for making braais
Sex
Love and cuddling
Babies

Mark sighed again. He does it well, that sighing thing, especially when it’s accompanied by the little hum. Okay, that’s a start, he said in an annoying tone of encouragement, as though exhorting me to do my best. But for a small accident of birth, Mark could’ve had an outstanding career as a Brown Owl.
“Okay, I know the braai thing is a little romantic ideal of mine.”
The truth was that no one ever shaped up to my father in this department. There he was in my head, squatting beside the open fire. If need be, he could create a braai with nothing but a strand of wire (cut from a handy fence) and a pair of pliers to fashion the grid. Intermittently humming Sarie Marais and muttering, “Die engelsman is slim, nê?” he’d use his penknife to turn the meat. He and his were all sort of sepia coloured by memory.
“Well, if you meet anyone sepia-coloured, doll, avoid him. Only a serious alcohol problem will do that for you,” said Paul, while Mark pointed out that boys didn’t carry penknives nowadays. Trės uncool. Not to mention that my last three boyfriends could probably have burnt their fingers on a microwave.
We moved on to the sex issue. They both began to laugh so hard they lost their breath. It was difficult for Paul to maintain his languid air in the circumstances, but his mastery of the leisurely arts is unsurpassed.
“You told him,” I accused Mark.
“No,” said Mark at last, “But it wasn’t hard to pick up the state of your sex life, darling, when The Boy told us that joke. Remember? The one about ‘how do you find a clitoris’? And the answer’s ‘Who cares?’ He chided you for sense of humour failure. And you…”
“Well, I was irritated. What do you expect?”
“… you said, coming from him, it lacked a certain irony.”
The Boy was my recent ex boyfriend. Very recent. In fact he had attained his ex status about six hours before. It was still painful, somewhere in the region of my ribs. And I could guess the state of my eyes: Mark had just suggested that I borrow his Estėe Lauder mask before thinking of moving from the house in the morning.
The next entry on my list caused so much laughter that I decided unilaterally to move on to Babies. They stopped laughing. Hhmm, they both said.
“We’ll come back to that,” I said.  “Let’s get to the cons.”

CONS
Misery
Destruction of self esteem
Misery
No olives in your fridge
More misery

“Oh my God.” That was Mark. “It’s just occurred to me: you broke up with him over the olives. Because he ate the olives. I cannot believe you broke up with someone for eating all the olives.”
Paul sat up suddenly and stared at Mark with patent disbelief. Paul was a chef. Paul took olives very, very seriously.
“Please, please,” I leapt into the breach. “Don’t break up over the olives.”
The Boy, as they had named him, had an attractive quaff of blonde hair which tended to fall over his forehead when he was trying to be artful or boyish. It was the most attractive thing about him.
No, that’s not true. He did have a few attractive qualities. When he wasn’t around his mates, he could be … well, vulnerable even, though Mark would scoff to hear me say it. Sometimes on a Sunday, when no one else was around, he’d bring his well thumbed collection of poetry from long ago English I.
We’d sit outside in the shade, with his head in my lap, and he’d read that “kisses are a better fate than wisdom”. And then, as the sun glanced gently through the jacaranda, anointing his stomach with light where his T shirt rode up, I’d dare to hope.
But then he’d somehow forget to phone for a week. And he’d be flippant and off hand when I met him for breakfast, because his chinas were there. And they’d be laddish and discuss some game or other. And possibly women. Not quite offensively, but in that tone. Then I’d begin to wonder if hope could ever be a viable alternative to wise cracking for women.
Anyway, the four of us Mark, Paul, The Boy and I had decided to have a dinner party to mark the fact that we’d all made it past the mystical three-month barrier, where most relationships seemed to founder. It was all to do with sex in the new millennium, and tedious stuff like the threat of death.
You see, if you spoke seriously to a man about dating and kissing, about wanting to know him better before opting for sex, he generally thought he was being given rejection Number One where you dump him with a compassionate smile and a gentle hand on the shoulder, saying things like: “You deserve better than me”. 
If you did sleep with him, you weren’t supposed to dump him the next day because of the state of his toothbrush or his foreplay. You were supposed to be monogamous. So you’d slide into this state of mini marriage, during which he’d drink all your beer, eat all your olives and suggest you stay in. Then he’d fall asleep on the sofa, or worse: invite his appalling friends around. After a respectable three months with obvious relief on both sides and before your CDs had co-mingled you’d break up.
The Boy lasted three months and three days. The night before our dinner party he had taken me out. He hadn’t told me we were to meet his mates, but I should have guessed when he vetoed my suggestion of quiet and chatty.
Perhaps a small dinner somewhere in Melville? Anywhere we could sit on the pavement, before winter hit us with free floating despondency, and everyone hibernated for three months. But oh no, we had to go to some roof place, where exotic people danced sinuously to random sounds from unrecognisable instruments. The less exotic, like me, stood about nodding in time and saying: “Hey!” in a meaningful way.
He and his chinas danced briefly and wordlessly with a Nigerian beauty, before devoting much of the evening to the useful discussion of how su bur ban other people were, for not coming to places like this. (Subtext: We’re so ama-azingly cool!)
Eventually we joined a table of silent Ethiopians in dreadlocks, who nodded and said: “Hey!”
“You see,” they congratulated themselves. “It’s only in places like this you’ll get to meet, like, the real people of the continent.”
I don’t think the Ethiopians could speak any English, but they silently offered us some little sticks to chew. I declined. I like to identify my little sticks before I chew them. After the little sticks, the little minds went Zi ing, and I astutely discerned that I could expect nothing further of value from them.
I think they let themselves into the house at eight in the morning, when I lay listening to the clamour of coffee and the serious assuagement of the munchies. But I never dreamt they would dare … It was only when Paul, who took olives very, very seriously, donned his apron to make the Chicken Marengo at seven last night … It was only when he opened the fridge with a flourish and I heard his shriek, and saw his hand flutter to his cheek in horror …
Later, I had crept self pityingly into Mark’s bedroom and moaned about men, to which they’d uttered things like “Mm” or “I kno ow”.  When I’d crawled under their duvet, they’d both just sighed and shifted to accommodate me.
It wasn’t so much that The Boy was so special or anything. ("I kno ow.") Deep down I suppose I had known, only I hadn’t been ready to face it yet. ("Mm") You know?  Like a small secret you keep buried in your gut and don’t want to look at yet? (“Oh I know, I have that all the time” Mark looks sharply at Paul. Paul shuts up.) And it wasn’t really about the olives. But olives could be a sign, couldn’t they? They could be a symbol.
But suddenly I didn’t know if I could bear it all again. I was so tired of the tedious run of it all. ("Mm.") I mean, the whole process: the searching, the sussing, the sex thing. The endless dispiriting round. And winter was nearly here, with chapped lips (“I kno-ow, plays havoc with kissing) and frost which yellowed the grass and withered hope. ("Oh my God.")
So it had occurred to me that, with our empirical conclusion that men’s only advantage was babies, perhaps I should circumvent the whole process by having one. (Silence.) I mean, the only reason women in their ‘30s rushed around desperately seeking Sam, was for that. Wasn’t it? (Silence) Then I could contemplate the Ticking Time, when it came, without despairing. I could be a whole person who didn’t need a relationship. Couldn’t I? I was still young … (Absolute silence.)

* * *

I think I realised that Mark and Paul were getting into the idea when Paul arrived home with a fluffy hyaena. He said babies shouldn’t grow up prejudiced, simply because hyaenas had suffered a bad press over the years.
“Oh my God,” muttered Mark, with the hint of a hum, “Next thing our baby’ll be sleeping with a vulture.”
“Whose baby?”
So they told me my baby needed male figures, even if they were, you know, just a touch camp. (Well okay, okay, as camp as Petronella, queen of the Kalahari, Princess of Parys.) And that they, who were unlikely to have their own, were the perfect protectors, the most doting of uncles …
“So we think of this baby as ours too,” concluded Paul.
I pointed out that the first step would be to locate the father of my unconceived child. So we made a list.
Bruce
That boy who plays guitar at the Bassline

They didn’t like Bruce. Bruce was a press photographer, an Old Africa Hand who wore a flak jacket and had white lines around his eyes from screwing them up in the sun. He said things like: “Hey Babe.”
I pointed out that Bruce, besides being tall and having perfect eyesight, was actually rather bright.
“No one bright stands up to take a picture when bullets are flying at him,” said Mark.
I mentioned that he was creative and had nearly won a Pulitzer Prize.
“No one nearly wins the Pulitzer Prize,” said Paul. “They win it or they don’t.”
“Well he’s macho,” I said. “Don’t you think we need a little balance around here?”
They declared that macho was not genetic. We’d hire a Sumo Wrestler as a child minder. The boy from the Bassline they dealt with by pointing out that not knowing his name was a small impediment.
That was when I suggested Mark. There was silence, before they both started with the humming thing.

* * *

“Wait, wait,” yelled Paul. “Our baby can’t be conceived willy nilly – no pun intended, darling. He or she needs to be welcomed properly into existence … with a Salmon Soufflė.”
They had just tenderly taken my temperature and told me to relax with my feet up. I had pointed out that I was not yet pregnant.  Soberly sitting down, they also told me coyly that, in preparation for all this, they had taken themselves off for joint AIDS tests.
“It was so romantic,” Mark said. They linked hands and gazed at each other. I became a little nauseous. Hey, perhaps I was pregnant after all.
Anyway, the preparation took a long time. Paul went shopping - a process filled with disappointments (at the poor quality of the salmon) and rekindled excitements (at the thought of crayfish instead).
Then there were the tarot cards to be read. We were to expect a newcomer. A male newcomer. Mark sighed and Paul produced a book of names.
“Aaron?” suggested Mark, starting at the beginning.
“Let’s get on with it,” I muttered.
“Wait, wait,” said Paul and he rushed off for a crystal … wait, wait, and some scented candles. The crystal was for balance and serenity, he said. I needed both. 
“Do you want a hot water bottle for your back?” asked Mark. I pointed out calmly, with only slightly gritted teeth (Hey, these crystal things work), that I wasn’t actually giving birth. And never would at this rate.
After the crayfish soufflė and sparkling wine, followed by herbal tea . . . ("Coffee’s bad for pregnant women.” - “I’m not pregnant.” - “You soon will be.") … we all repaired to my bedroom.
“Aren’t you going to leave, Paul?” I asked hopefully.
“Why? How’re you going to get this done? I thought perhaps I could help.”
Mark and I gazed at Paul until a kind of startled recognition, quickly followed by horror, overtook all trace of languid. He shrieked, his hand fluttering to his cheek.
This was how we came to be rushing into old Mr Nathan’s all night pharmacy to beg for syringes. Old Mr Nathan, who has known me all my life, enquired after my acne problem.
“That was adolescence, Mr Nathan,” I enunciated. “Ad o lescence. I’m grown up now.”
“Oh, are you dear? And what do you need the syringe for?”
“Well, um . . .”
Humming noises in the background. Mr Nathan looked severe and explained that, because of something called peer pressure and here he threw a grim glance behind me people would sometimes try to get me to do things that would get me into trouble.
At midnight the three of us were sitting disconsolately and syringeless on the kitchen floor. We had finished all the olives in the fridge.
“Well,” I said, “It’s back to the list then.”
“Perhaps it’s just as well,” said Mark. “You know they say there’s a gay gene.”
“So what,” I said archly.
“Well, since this is our only shot at this child thing, I thought perhaps I’d like to bank on a couple of grandchildren.”

* * *

“Hey Babe.”
Bruce spread his hands before him and added: “No problem.” I had been right to call him in for a job like this, he said. When the assignment needed the right touch, it was best to brief the man who knew the terrain. 
I got a sudden flash of my baby swaggering down the birth canal, a pack of Camels in his tiny flak jacket, camera at the ready.
“Ja well no fine. What can I tell you? When I was in Nigeria …”
“Yes that’s just riveting, but have you been tested?”
“Hey Babe, sure. Don’t worry, I don’t shoot blanks ... Oh you mean that other thing? That too.”
I spent a long time considering underwear that evening. I mean, he’d seen quite a bit in his time. I didn’t want to disgrace myself with the old pair which had turned grey in the washing machine. On the other hand, the new satin pair I’d bought ... it must be just over three months ago now ... were a bit frivolous for the task. He was so macho. What if he threw me on the bed and ripped them off with his teeth. I’d have to say: “Wait, wait, these are imported. Let me get the old pair.”
Paul answered the door in his apron. He was making another soufflė, with salmon this time. Through the open door, I caught sight of him behind Bruce, running his hand from the top of his own head, in a vaguely horizontal line to the middle of Bruce’s neck somewhere. He never believed me. I told him he was tall.
I was still trying, without mortal injury, to push Mark’s evil-tempered Siamese from my lap. I liked cats, but surely nothing could be sadder than the sight of me waiting here with my cats and gay housemates. I had, after all, just invited an almost-stranger over to impregnate me.
He declined the soufflė, and I nearly called it all off. I mean, how could one breed with a man who had the sensitivity of a blue bottle fly? How could anyone refuse such a consecrated offering?
The three of us repaired to the kitchen for a team talk. I was considering using Paul as grand justification for changing my mind. This whole thing ... I just wasn’t as sure anymore ... But then Paul turned all selfless on us. And the two of them seemed so certain ...
No, they were right. This was definitely the right thing. Men just had not evolved to the point of sustaining a relationship.
Paul sniffed and raised his head, tilting it to one side in the high minded way people assume before saying something they consider very profound.
“Sensitivity,” he declared, “is not genetic. We’ll hire a ballet dancer as a child minder.”
“What about the Sumo wrestler?”
“We can have a Sumo wrestler and a ballet dancer,” he pronounced grandly.
As Bruce removed his flak jacket, he actually winked at me which was a bit much. I mean, we’d all got the point. Okay already, we know you’re a Camel man among Camel men.
He undressed slowly, unbuttoning his khaki shirt and running his hands over his chest, just in case I’d missed it. The hair, Babe, the hair symbol of manhood, emblem of virility.
“Right Babe, let’s get this show on the road.” And he lowered himself to the bed, with the vaguely patronising reassurance that he’d try not to hurt me. Try?
Hah.
Nothing happened. I waited. Still nothing happened. He was silent. I was still.
I waited a bit more. Men didn’t like to be hurried. Perhaps he was gathering the impetus to leap. The Siamese leapt instead, curling between us on the bed. He was silent. I was still.
Suddenly he did leap, burying his face in my bosom and leaking tears from screwed up eyes, little sobs breaking from his muscled chest.
“It’s just that when I think of my own little laaitie, you know? Of never taking my own little guy down the Congo. I just don’t know that I can go through with this.”

* * *

“Perhaps the next one shouldn’t be told,” I suggested.
The name problem, when I brought it up again, was suddenly as nothing. We’d had a couple of drinks by then. So much for impediments.  This whole baby thing seemed to have developed a momentum of its own.
We left Melville for a recce at the Bassline, passing men who hawked wire sculptures, and trendy men with shaved heads and consciously ugly glasses, and suited ones with bellies, and all the faux-bohemian men …
All I could see now were Progenitors in Prospect. Short sighted men, tall men, men with bow legs and, boy! There was a predisposition to heart attacks if ever I saw one.
The Bassline was filled mainly with genetic catastrophes. Except for the man who played guitar. There was no doubt that he was blessed by breeding. I was just noticing the shadows under his cheekbones, and the way those little pecs or specs or whatever danced as he stretched over his guitar. Paul leaned over and pointed out the creativity of that little riff he’d just played.
“I have a violin for Aaron,” he whispered, “He can start when he’s three.”
I rolled my eyes and told them to bugger off. I wasn’t going to get very far with them hanging around. “Now just remember, ask him...”
“I know what to do.”
But Mark’s sister Megan turned up before they could leave, supported by her crowd of just about twenty somethings. How is it, I asked Paul, that just twenty somethings are always more assured than I ever was (or as Paul unkindly pointed out, than I am now)? They were tripping over their platforms to kiss Mark in the flirtatious way young women affect with gay men. Paul hissed that charmed lives resulted from a combination of long legs and short imagination. And tended to be marked by a white faced, kohl eyed look. “Bad genetic sign.”
Megan asked why we were there, in a tone which suggested her slight embarrassment at hanging out in the same place as those who were so lacking in cool. Mark, who can never keep his ingenuous mouth closed, went and told her.
“Hey ...” said Megan. She flicked back her hair and gave a quick, superior sniff.
They gazed at me, mouths a little agape and one still in braces, dear God – and I transformed into The Ancient One. I stammered that this was a life choice, not yet a necessity and that I could still ... you know, there was still time ...
“Oh I kno ow,” they all chorused, patronising little mouths moueing at me.
“But we think it’s really cool, you know, like for someone like you?”
Megan said she thought the guitarist brilliant. “I mean it’s so clever of you, you know? I mean to pick someone like him. So good for the child.”
“Good eyesight?” cut in Paul.
“No, like I mean, you know …”
“Musical?”
“No o. Well … that too.”
“O oh, you mean because he’s slightly tinted, darling? Well, the fact is, we picked him for aesthetic reasons. The child will blend so nicely with our pumpkin coloured walls.”
The upshot was that, after gazing speculatively at the guitarist, Megan declared a further recce to be required. And that she, being the selfless girl she was, would discover all there was to discover about him, and ask all the necessary icky questions, so that I needn’t see him more than the once.
“You don’t want to risk a relationship starting,” she said sagely, gazing at me in expectation of gratitude.
“Well, it’s a tough job ...” muttered Paul, but Mark frowned at him.
“Don’t say I never do anything for you,” said Megan as she took up a position just to the left of the dais.

* * *

I settled into my relaxed new life with the Siamese, relatively certain that I was committed to nothing for at least three months. Oh, I still believed in the principle ... But in the meantime, the fridge was always full of olives, and I began to read The Alexandria Quartet because I knew it would take a lo-ong time.
I’d forgotten, however, that the cycle moved faster for the just twenty somethings. I remembered this when I arrived home to soufflė, my temperature being taken at the door, and Megan announcing that Robert (His name! The last impediment fallen) was amenable and just perfect for someone like me.
As it turned out, the fates were all with me. My temperature was just right, I had not a zit in sight and so, at last, this was it. Finally.
There was plenty of time before the Bassline really got going. Perhaps I’d just stop off for a cup of coffee on the way. Just to fortify myself, you know? And of course a shot of caffeine was necessary if I was to be up all night. I hauled the book from my bag. It would be perfect to carry me through the first trimester.
“Given up on men?”
He was smallish and wore glasses. Absolutely not on, genetically speaking.
“Why?”
He sipped at his cappuccino. His face dimpled and ... well, kind of flickered..
“Last time I gave up on women, I read War and Peace. But that’s a bit clichėd. Yours is inspired. I wonder how long it’ll take you to get through?”
He joined me for coffee. He asked, I nodded. There was still plenty of time, and it was nice to have company in the meantime.
We talked about, well everything. Books and movies and clubs he enjoyed the roof place, but generally preferred somewhere you could talk.
It was ten o’clock. Well okay, probably better to skip the first set now, and get there for the second. Robert would be more relaxed in any case.
We discussed men, women strangely he had no tone and relationships. We switched to wine. It was important not to drink too much caffeine. I’m sure it couldn’t help the fertilisation process and I’d just get jittery.
He was witty in every other respect, of course, a minefield of bad heredity. But now that I’d given up men as a romantic option, I could enjoy him - just for the company, you understand. Oops, it was past midnight. Well, maybe it’d be better to get there just before the end. Then I could act decisively and not spend the entire night hanging about.
He was busy telling me how he preferred to defer the sex thing, and even then he liked to date, rather than move in together. Funny, when his face flashed with that dark cleverness and then glowed with light as he laughed, he had quite a mesmerising effect. Certainly nice to share a glass of wine with.
He ordered tequila while I was in the loo. Well ... that was confident of him. I liked confidence in a friendly companion, if it were balanced, you know? By ... well, by…
“I just thought tequila would be fun,” he said. Fun, that was it … balanced by fun.
“But don’t drink it if you wouldn’t like to ...” And sensitivity … balanced by sensitivity.
“… I’ll make sure you get home safely, okay? You needn’t worry...” Protectiveness was important.
“… It’s just that I don’t want this to end. You’re ... kind of special.” Oh yes, and charm. Charm was essential. It made me wish he wasn’t so deeply into deferment.
Oh God, what was I saying? They’d all kill me. And Megan had gone to so much trouble. Paul had made so many soufflės, Mark taken so many temperatures. Oh jeez, it was already too late. The night was gone.
I stared at him and blinked. It must be the tequila. Those genetic shortcomings what were they again?  Um, eyes? But they were such nice eyes they had that way of sparkling when he talked about music and books. Oh yes ... his body! But he had such a nice way of touching as he talked. And those dimples, flashing with wit. Oh God, this was a disaster.
“Do you eat olives?” I asked.
“I don’t mind them in my food. But I never eat them straight from the fridge.”

Copyright Jo-Anne Richards

Jo-Anne is a novelist and university lecturer. She has had four novels published, and short stories included in five collections. She lives in Johannesburg with two of her great loves – a man named Fred and a bull terrier named Bobbie. Another two, a girl named Emma and a boy named Joshua, join them intermittently.

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