Free Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett

go out to my studio after dinner and work until Sylvia was well asleep, but tonight that seemed a bad idea. Yet so did the breaking of routine seem like a bad idea. In fact no ideas presented themselves for consideration. I could not abandon Sylvia with the weight of the situation and yet sitting and stewing with her in the cauldron of anxiety that was our bedroom appeared no better. All I could imagine hearing, since there was no speaking, was the bubbling of the bubbling broth around us and an occasional pop from the fire. Then my mind turned from my concern for Sylvia and by extension my concern for myself vis-à-vis Sylvia, to simply me or perhaps simple me. Just what kind of massive quagmire had my, I imagined, rather average-sized sexual appendage gotten me into some twenty-eight years ago, leaving me to roam through life happily, though clumsily, for so long, only to find myself feeling for the bottom of the mess with my foot while trying not to drown, laying my arms angel-like flat, as I had read in survival books, so that I might just float out and to safety, my organ, my penis, my stupid dick, for all the pleasure that I had imagined that it gave me, what had it done to me now, if indeed it had done anything at all, because I really did not recall the face of the woman in the photograph, the mother of my alleged daughter, and I was no playboy, was always rather backward, awkward, if not plain ugly, had thought myself so lucky that Sylvia would even give me the time of day and thought when she did that it was because she believed she could feel secure with a homely man that other women did not find attractive, but there had been others, a few, and I thought I remembered every one of them and every name and who could forget a name like Carly Caro, alliteration having always worked throughout life as an irritant on me, and I had not been the kind of man who had oneor two-night stands, at least it was never my desire, as I was always just a little needy and clingy and was possessed by the desire to not be that kind of man and why wouldn’t this Katie Caro have told me that she was gravid, enceinte, fraught, in a family way, parturient, with child, replete, expectant, about to bear fruit, knocked up? Was I so unattractive a man that even when he got a woman pregnant she would flee for the hills? And if I was that off-putting, physically or intellectually, why should she have kept the child at all? I mean, there were ways, and why would she then tell the poor genetically disadvantaged child who her father was? Perhaps upon learning of my career, that there was one at all, she decided that there was possibly a bit more to me than had met her eye (and apparently other parts), or maybe she thought, mercenarily, that there was something to be had, and oh how mistaken this Chloe Caro and her daughter were. What if it was all just a big mistake? A faux pas. Or worse, a ruse. A scam. We’d get the test done wherever one goes to get such a test done and we would discover that I was no more related to Meg Caro than I was to Chuck Berry or Igor Stravinsky and yet somehow I knew that if my pecker came out of this mess clean, untarnished, Sylvia and I would never again be the same. I just didn’t know why that would be so, but I knew it all the same, talking to each other would be difficult, I would not know where to stand when she brushed her teeth, when to leave to work, when to come back or how to touch her in or out of bed, and I was filled right then with such sadness and perhaps terror that I was far less afraid of Meg Caro’s actually being proved my daughter. I thought all of this while Sylvia and I lay in our queen-sized bed (she’d never wanted a king because we’d be too far apart), on opposite edges, the six-hundred-thread-count sheets she’d insisted on, growing as cold as an overworn cliché between us and the colder that space became the more difficult it became to traverse. When her back was turned, though she