A Father's Affair Read Online Free Page A

cent – would it turn baby blue?’
    Bo threw his teething ring on the floor. I picked it up and gave it back. That was the great thing about correcting proofs: I could do it at home, with Bo around, so I didn’t have to miss
a single day of his first years of life.
    ‘Go ahead and start working whenever you feel able,’ I said to Monika, purely out of self-interest.
    ‘I don’t understand how you can collaborate on spreading that kind of research,’ she said after she’d spent an evening poring over the journal for biochemists. ‘For
every article they write, they must kill I don’t know how many test animals.’
    ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘but it pays for the nappies.’
    ‘Oh, sure, hide behind Bo. Burden that poor child with your complicity in the torturing of animals.’
    ‘How do you think they developed the pill?’ I asked.
    Monika had gone back to work. At Small World, a travel agency specializing in environmentally sound tourism. ‘A contradiction in terms,’ I said.
    ‘That’s right,’ Monika said. ‘But if you promise not to go on whining about that, I’ll keep my mouth shut about the blood of all those innocent animals on your
hands.’
    And so it went.
    Monika started taking the pill again. I divided my attention between Bo’s creeping and crowing and ‘the temperature dependence of creatine kinase fluxes in the rat heart’.
    ‘“Male Wistar rats,”’ I told Bo, who was busy pulling himself up on the coffee table, ‘“were anaesthetized with diethyl ether and injected intravenously with
50 IU heparin approximately one minute before the hearts were exised.” See? Your mother’s making a big fuss about nothing. First the anaesthetic, then the heart is removed. How much
kinder to animals can you get?’
    Bo gave up trying to stand and started crying. With my red pen, I inserted a
c
between the
x
and the
i
in ‘exised’.
    This morning I woke up at five. I went into Bo’s room and sat on the edge of his bed, for at least half an hour. I studied his sleeping features. The shape of his
forehead, his hairline, his eyebrows, the colour of his eyes. (Bo sleeps with his eyes open. He didn’t always. It started when he was three – with a nightmare.) I examined the little
spots in his irises, the length of his lashes, the wrinkles in his eyelids, the slant of his cheekbones, the shape of his nose, the size of his nostrils, the line of his jaw, the shape of his
mouth, his lips.
    He’s entering puberty. There’s a pimple on his chin.
    I was hoping for a hunch, something in his face that would suddenly remind me of . . . That’s what I was hoping for, and it scared me to death.
    But nothing happened. Nothing came to me. I crawled back into bed and fell asleep. There was no answer in my dreams either.

7
    I ’d always thought that Bo was conceived by leave of the Amsterdam police.
    Monika and I had been to a benefit performance at the Haarlem Municipal Theatre. A group of famous actors and actresses were putting on a play to help combat starvation in
Africa. A few months earlier, the director of the theatre had taken an all-in, four-wheel-drive adventure tour of the Sahara with Small World. Out of gratitude for the care shown, and because
he’d made it back alive, he sent complimentary tickets to the travel agency all the time. The play was a crashing bore, but the cocktail party afterwards made up for everything. We identified
a large flock of Famous and Prominent People, the salmon was fat and tender, and the wine, the whisky, yes, even the orange juice, were a cut above the average. We stuffed an envelope containing a
political statement in the collection box meant for generous contributions (‘Starvation is a direct result of the unequal distribution of power in the world. Cancer cannot be cured with
aspirin, starvation cannot be stamped out by charity. Support the revolutionary movements in the Third World!’). Then we hung around until long after midnight,