The Perfect Father
“I was telling you that Cosmo is really pushing the free-range chicken tonight, and having had it for dinner myself, I can tell you it’s delicious. But the shrimp étouffée also sounds wonderful to me. I know you love seafood. You want to give that a try instead?”
Chase gazed at her for a moment before replying, noting for the first time that Sylvie really did have the most beautiful blue eyes he’d ever seen. Not a pale, glassy blue, but a deep, midnight blue that bordered on violet. He didn’t know why he hadn’t noticed before.
“Uh, surprise me,” he finally said, not altogether certain he was talking exclusively about his dinner selection. “I’m not really sure what I want.”
“Okay.”
As she turned to ring up his order, he observed with much interest the efficiency of her actions. He liked to watch Sylvie. She moved freely and easily, completely unconscious of her own gestures, utterly comfortable in her surroundings and with herself. That was something Chase had never quite been able to master in himself. There was still a lingering essence of self-consciousness within him, a quiet little voice that would never quite let him forget the meagerness of his beginnings or the fear that he might end up a nobody.
Yet he never tried to completely quell his fears. Because he knew they were what caused him to be so driven. Success and wealth had come to him earlier than he had anticipated, and now that he’d had a taste of how good life could be, he’d be damned if he’d ever do anything to jeopardize his position.
Even if that meant spending the rest of his life alone, he thought. In the long run, he knew he’d be a happier man because of it.
* * *
After ringing in Mr. Buchanan’s order, Sylvie handed it off to one of the waiters headed back to the kitchen, almost hitting her co-worker in the face with it as he passed. She apologized sheepishly as she spun back around. Business at Cosmo’s that evening had been slow, even for a Tuesday night, but her timing had been off completely since coming in to work several hours ago. As she frequently did at times like this, she couldn’t help wondering yet again why she hadn’t put her degree in humanities to better use than tending bar.
Maybe, she decided as she ran a blue grease pencil under the last of the drinks orders at the service bar, it was because no matter how hard she looked, there was never, ever a listing in the classified ads under the heading Humanities.
“Order up, Sylvie.”
She spun around to find one of the waiters scooting a plate of oysters Rockefeller precariously close to the edge of the bar, and she snatched it up just as it was about to go over the side.
“Keith!” she called out to the swiftly departing server after she’d placed the appetizer in front of a well-dressed couple seated at the bar.
Keith turned. “What is it? I’m in the weeds big time.”
She threw him what she knew was her most beguiling smile. “Got a minute?”
He smiled back as he returned to the bar. “Sure. But just one. And just because it’s you who’s asking.”
She tried to feign a more intimate interest in him. “Mind a personal question?”
His smile broadened. “How personal?”
“You, uh, you graduated from Princeton, right?”
He nodded.
“And you’re going to Villanova now? Law school?”
Another nod. “What’s this leading up to, Sylvie?”
She extended her index finger onto the bar, coyly drawing a few idle circles in the remnants of a spilled beer. “What, um...what’s your G.P.A?”
“Three point ninety-eight. Why?”
Sylvie looked at him, taking in his blond hair, blue eyes and slender build. Nice genes, she thought. And his coloring was identical to hers, so if she asked him to father her child, the baby would resemble her no matter what. “Oh, I was just thinking,” she began again. “I need to ask you about some—”
Her words ceased when Keith cried out, bent over suddenly and cupped a hand over his left eye.
“What?” she asked, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he muttered as he straightened. He manipulated his left eyelid gently over a red, watery eye. “I just got something in my contact. It’s okay now.”
Sylvie studied him more closely. “You wear contact lenses?”
“Yeah, I’m blind as a bat without them.”
“Oh.”
“Now, then,” Keith continued, wiping away the last of the tears. His eye was still quite red and puffy. “What was this personal question you wanted to ask?”
“Your eyesight is really bad?” Sylvie asked.
“The worst. Everyone in my family has lousy eyesight. I don’t think any of us made it out of childhood without getting a pair of glasses. Mine have lenses as thick as Coke bottles.”
She nodded. “I see.”
“And this personal question?” he asked again, clearly interested in getting as personal as possible with Sylvie.
“Uh,” she hedged. “Never mind. I forgot what I was going to say.”
His expression fell. “Oh. Well, if you remember...”
“I’ll let you know.”
When Keith was out of sight, Sylvie pulled a well-worn scrap of paper from inside her shirt pocket and unfolded it. Keith’s name was midway down the list, beneath a half dozen or so others that had been crossed out. Leonard had been her first choice as the ideal candidate to father her child, but she’d learned he had recently become engaged. William, the second of her male acquaintances on the list, had just returned from a skiing trip with both arms and one leg in a cast. Jack, whose wavy brown hair she had loved, also had a brother in prison, and Sylvie simply didn’t want to risk the felony gene turning up in any child of hers. Donnie, she’d discovered, had worn braces all through junior high and high school.
So far, none of the candidates Sylvie had considered with good genetic potential for fatherhood was working out at all. There always seemed to be something that just didn’t quite set well. Edgar had been close, she recalled, but there was that big bump on the bridge of his nose that, despite his assurances to the contrary, she wasn’t quite convinced he’d suffered in a fight. It might just be a congenital condition. And Michael...well, he had been just this side of perfect. But he’d confessed to having absolutely no musical inclination whatsoever. And Sylvie wasn’t about to give birth to a no-talent child.
Yet there was still that question of the second set of chromosomes she would need to make a baby. There must be someone, she thought, looking down at the list again. Someone who would enjoy a little intimate rendezvous with her—maybe two, depending on how well it went the first time—and then get the heck out of her life. But who?
She glanced discreetly over her shoulder at Mr. Buchanan, the one person who frequented the bar whose nightly appearances she genuinely welcomed. Most of her regular customers were jerks, which was why she hadn’t explored that group of men when considering potentially perfect fathers. But Mr. Buchanan, she thought now...
That little conversation the two of them had just enjoyed had pretty much reinforced everything she already knew about him. He had absolutely no desire to encumber himself with a family, because his work was his life. Therefore, should he be the one to father her baby, she wouldn’t have to worry about him becoming all sappy and sentimental, wanting to play a role in the raising of that child. He was handsome, too, she noted, not for the first time, and he seemed the result of a better-than-average set of genes. She liked him. An intimate rendezvous with Mr. Buchanan wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Of course, it would help if she knew his first name.
She scanned the list in her hand once again. There were five names left, all of them men Sylvie didn’t know particularly well. She wasn’t sure she could make love with a man she scarcely knew, especially when she hadn’t made love that often with men she knew extremely well. But time was running out. It was already the last week of February. She’d be ovulating again in two weeks. If she wanted a Christmas baby—and she did very much want a Christmas baby—she was going to have to find the perfect father for her child quickly.
“Order up, Sylvie. Shrimp étouffée.”
Her gaze traveled slowly from the plate of food a passing waiter placed on the bar to the man who had asked her to surprise him. And as she made her way slowly down the bar toward Mr. Buchanan, she began to study him in a way she never had before. When she set the plate before him, he looked up to murmur his thanks, and she found herself staring into clear green eyes full of intelligence.
She moved slightly away as he began to eat, but continued to observe him closely, noting with interest the expensively cut, jet black hair, the high cheekbones and perfectly sculpted jaw, the finely formed lips beneath a near-perfect nose that claimed not a chink. She had always thought Mr. Buchanan was very attractive. She considered him smart and ambitious. She also knew that although he was scarcely forty, he headed up one of Philadelphia’s most prominent architectural firms.
When he turned to lift a hand in greeting to another regular at the bar, Sylvie studied his eyes in profile. No contacts, she noted. When he turned back to her, he caught her watching him and smiled, and she noticed that one of his front teeth was bent just the tiniest bit over the other. Not enough to mar his appearance in any way, but enough to let her know he’d never had orthodontic work done.
She pulled the pencil from behind her ear and added another name to the bottom of her list, drawing an arrow from the words Mr. Buchanan to the space immediately beneath Keith’s name. Then she tucked the list back into her shirt pocket.
“Hey, Mr. Buchanan,” she said thoughtfully as she reached for his empty glass to refill it for his usual second drink. “You know, there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Do you play any musical instruments?”
Two
Chase was stumped. “Musical instruments?” he asked.
Sylvie nodded as she reached for a bottle of Laphroig from the mirrored shelves behind her. Had he become such a regular at Cosmo’s that she didn’t even bother to ask what he was drinking anymore, or if he even wanted a second? he wondered. Come to think of it, he couldn’t in fact remember the last time she had asked him what had once been the lead-in to all their encounters. However, the question she was asking now was a new one.
“Yeah,” she replied. “You seem like the musical type.”
“Well, I played saxophone in my high school pep band,” he confessed. “And I was part of a little jazz combo in college.”
She smiled, and Chase felt ridiculously happy that he had said something to please her. “Really?” she asked. “Saxophone?” She seemed to consider something for a moment, then nodded in what he could only liken to approval. “Saxophone’s cool.”
“Well, I haven’t played in years, of course—”
“But you were pretty good, right?”
He nodded, all modesty aside. “I was very good.”
Sylvie’s smile broadened as she placed his drink before him. “So tell me something else,” she said.
“Yes?”
“How have you been feeling lately?”
He narrowed his eyes at her suspiciously. “I’ve been feeling fine lately,” he told her. “Why? Do I look bad? Do you know something I don’t?”
She shook her head. “Just wanted to make sure you’re in good health.”
“By my physician’s latest account, my health is excellent, thanks.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“Why so many questions?”
She studied him intently for a long time before answering, and suddenly Chase wasn’t sure he wanted to hear her reply.
“Can I be honest with you?” she asked him.
“Of course.”
She glanced around at their surroundings, at the two other bartenders and six or seven customers seated at the bar, at the flurry of waiters and waitresses who hustled around the service bar. His own gaze followed hers, and he wondered again what she was up to.
“I don’t think we should talk about it here,” she said. “But I’ll be getting off at eleven if we don’t get slammed any harder than this before then. Could I...could I maybe buy you a cup of coffee after my shift?”
Chase didn’t know what to say. He’d never seen Sylvie in a social situation before. Come to think of it, he wasn’t even sure he’d ever seen what she looked like from the waist down. Her invitation had come out of nowhere, completely unexpected. It unnerved him for some reason. He glanced down at his watch to find that it was just past ten. He’d have to wait an hour for her to finish up. Not that he had anything better lined up for the evening, he thought, but he probably ought to decline her invitation.
“Sure,” he heard himself reply, wondering when he’d made the decision to accept her invitation instead.
She released a long breath and looked very relieved for some reason. “Great. I appreciate it. So, what do you think of the étouffée...?”
* * *
A little over an hour later Sylvie sat opposite Mr. Buchanan at a tiny cocktail table in the corner of Cosmo’s bar, clutching a cup of coffee as if it were a lifeline and feeling a little sick to her stomach. Was she crazy? she asked herself, studying the man opposite her as unobtrusively as possible from beneath her lashes. For the past hour she had completed her work behind the bar on automatic pilot, her thoughts instead whirling around one customer in particular.
What did she really know about Mr. Buchanan, anyway? she wondered. Not his first name, that was for sure. But he was handsome, intelligent and successful, had impeccable taste and knew how to play the saxophone. There didn’t appear to be any one particular romantic interest in his life to prevent him from fathering her child. Although he’d come into Cosmo’s a couple of times with a date, he’d never seemed to be with the same woman twice. As he himself had said, he was rabidly single.
He was older than her thirty years, she reminded herself further, by a full decade. And he was too much a workaholic to enjoy any kind of social or family life, something else that was a definite factor in Sylvie’s favor. At his age, and with his occupation, he had no desire to be saddled by the responsibilities of fatherhood. If she had a child by him, there was no doubt in her mind that the baby would be hers alone.
But could she really ask him to do what she was thinking of asking him to do? Would she be able to go through with it herself if he agreed? Her stomach knotted painfully again. She tried to find reassurance by reminding herself how often she had thought her plan through, and how well she had everything under control. Unfortunately, when she looked into the cool green eyes of the big man seated across from her, she suddenly wondered if she really understood at all exactly what she was getting herself into.
“So, Sylvie,” Chase began, uncomfortable in his realization that the two of them had been sitting at the table for more than five minutes without exchanging a single word. “What’s on your mind?”
She was staring down into her coffee cup as if it held the answers to the secrets of the universe, her long blond bangs falling in a silky sheath over her forehead. A stray tress she had tucked behind one ear fell forward, too, and Chase suddenly wanted nothing more than to reach across the tiny table and push it back into place. He’d never really noticed how soft her hair appeared to be. But in the dim glow of the candle flickering on the table between them, everything about Sylvie suddenly seemed soft.
“I, uh,” she began quietly. She inhaled deeply, and Chase waited to hear the rest. “I sort of have something I’d like to ask you.”
“Another question?” he said, smiling when she continued to avoid looking at him. “You’ve had quite a few of those tonight.”
She nodded. “I, uh...” She paused, inhaled deeply, released her breath slowly and tried again. “I, uh, I have an older sister,” she began, finally glancing up, her gaze settling on his.
Good God, her eyes were blue, he thought again before the significance of her words struck him. Then he began to understand where all this was going. Oh, no. He’d heard that “I-have-a-sister/niece/cousin/dog groomer/hairdresser/whatever” speech before. Too many times. If Sylvie thought she was going to fix him up with her sister, she had another think coming. He’d had his fill of blind dates. Not only did they always backfire, he didn’t have the time.
“A sister,” he repeated blandly.
She nodded again. “She had a baby last year—that would be my nephew whose picture I showed you earlier this evening, and—”
“A baby?” Chase asked incredulously. Sylvie wanted to saddle him with a wife and a kid? What was she trying to do, wreck his life completely? What had he ever done to her? Hadn’t he just told her a short time ago that a family was the last thing he needed messing up his happiness?
He held up a hand to halt any other big plans she might be hatching. “Hold it right there, kid,” he instructed her, ignoring her frown at his use of the word kid. She probably wasn’t that much younger than him, but Chase was suddenly feeling like an antique beside her. “I’m not interested in being fixed up with your sister. Or her baby.”
Sylvie looked confused for a moment, but quickly recovered. She began to giggle, then the giggle became a chuckle, and the chuckle became full-fledged laughter. Chase couldn’t help but smile, too. Clearly he had misunderstood what she was going to say. She had no intention of getting him involved with her sister. He felt much better knowing that.
“Livy’s already happily married—I’m not trying to fix you up with her and her baby,” she said, confirming his suspicions and allowing him to breathe much more easily and laugh a little himself. “I’m trying to fix you up with me and my baby.”
Chase stopped laughing immediately. “What?”
Sylvie suddenly stopped laughing, too. She hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. Somehow the words had just jumped from her mouth. But now that they’d been spoken, she had nowhere to go but forward.
“I didn’t know you had a baby,” Mr. Buchanan said.
“I don’t,” she told him. “But ever since Livy had Simon, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to have a baby, too.”
“Just like that?”
She shook her head. “Simon’s nine months old now. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought ever since he was born. And according to my doctor, despite the fact that I’m only thirty, I don’t have a lot of time left to have a baby. If I’m going to become a mother—and I do want very much to become a mother—I don’t have time to sit around waiting for some potential husband who might not ever show up.”
“So why are you telling me this?”
Sylvie looked up to find her companion staring at her with frank curiosity. He hadn’t figured it out yet, she realized. She supposed what she was planning was rather unusual—asking a man to make love to her specifically so that she could become pregnant, and then get out of her life for good. There were probably a number of men who would say yes in an instant. The irony was, men like that were generally jerks. She wouldn’t want a jerk for her baby’s father, would she? Of course not. In an ideal world, she wouldn’t have to worry about all this. But this wasn’t an ideal world, was it?
“Because,” she said, feeling the words getting stuck in her throat, “because you’re nice looking, intelligent and talented, and...” She stared down at her hands, spread open on the table, then licked her lips nervously before concluding, “And I’d like my baby’s father to pass all those qualities along to him or her.”
His expression never changed, and she wasn’t sure whether or not she’d made herself clear.
“Meaning?” he asked.
His eyes were speculative, and the corner of his mouth twitched only the slightest bit. Oh, he knew what she meant, Sylvie thought. He just wanted her to spell it out for him.
“Meaning,” she tried to explain again, “that I’d like for you to be the father of my baby. I mean...if you’d consider it.”
For a long time Chase said nothing, only continued to stare at Sylvie as if she were speaking a foreign language. Finally he began again, “Are you actually saying you want me to donate my...” He glanced quickly around, cleared his throat and tried once more, his voice noticeably lower when he continued. “You want me to donate my sperm so you can be artificially inseminated with it?”
“Oh, heavens, no,” she assured him.
The fire that had flared to life in his midsection subsided some. Obviously he was misunderstanding whatever it was Sylvie was trying to say. Clearly she meant something else entirely. He only wished he could figure out what it was.
“I want you to make love to me,” she said.
“You what?”
“In two weeks. That’s when I’ll be ovulating again.”
The words didn’t register immediately with Chase. He knew what he thought he’d heard her say, of course, but he couldn’t quite believe she was saying what he thought she was saying. This time he was the one to stare down into his coffee without speaking. But his silence only seemed to inspire Sylvie, because she continued to prattle on nervously.
“Um, look, I know what you’re probably thinking about me right now. I know you must be...you know, wondering what kind of woman would ask a virtual stranger to make love to her just to get her pregnant, but—”
“Oh, we’re not really strangers,” Chase interrupted her, looking up. He fixed his gaze with hers. “Are we, Sylvie?”
She lifted one shoulder in an odd kind of shrug, but said nothing. He had never noticed how small she was, he thought. How delicate looking. She’d always seemed so strong to him, so straightforward, so unwilling to back down. He wondered how long she’d been considering him for the task at hand. And he wondered why what she was suggesting, something that should be no more than an indecent proposal, was in fact so utterly appealing.
“After all the conversations we’ve had over the last two years,” he continued, “how can you think of us as strangers? You talked me through that hostile takeover bid last summer, remember? I would have gone nuts if I hadn’t had you to confide in. And I think your advice helped me ward the bastards off better than any other I received.”
She smiled nervously. “Really?”
He nodded. “You were there for me when my dad died, too.”
“And you helped get me through the loss of my mom,” she added. “But you know what’s weird? I don’t even know your first name.”
“And I don’t know your last.”
“Venner,” she said immediately. “Sylvie Venner.”
“Chase,” he replied, extending his hand toward her. “Chase Buchanan.”
Sylvie placed her hand gingerly in his and smiled. She wasn’t sure, but she thought the two of them might just be making a deal.
* * *
It was after 2:00 a.m. when the closing bartender finally routed them from Cosmo’s. Chase walked Sylvie to her car, both of them moving slowly in spite of the below-freezing temperature, as if they had nowhere in particular to go. Downtown Philly was deserted this time of night, its chrome-and-glass high rises dark and vacant. She inhaled deeply, the scent of winter mingling with a hint of lingering bus fumes. The city seemed quieter than she knew it really was.
They had settled nothing for certain, she thought as she strode alongside him. Although she had spent much of the evening arguing her case eloquently and with forthright honesty, Chase hadn’t agreed to her request. But he hadn’t turned her down, either, she reminded herself. And he had seemed to enjoy their time together as much as she had.
When they reached her car she unlocked it, then tossed her purse into the passenger seat. She was about to pitch the book she’d been reading in her spare time in behind it, but he stayed her hand by circling her wrist with warm fingers.
“The Portable Emerson?” he asked when he saw the title, seeming not at all surprised by her choice of reading material.