The Latecomer, page 5
“We’ll see you and your partner on the eighth, at eleven a.m.,” said the receptionist for the famous infertility doctor.
She would have to tell him.
“What do you mean, infertile?” had been Salo’s first reaction.
“I don’t know. I’m just concerned. I’d just like to get checked out. Both of us to get checked out.”
“But we haven’t been trying to get pregnant,” Salo said. He looked more mystified than anything. This gave her hope.
“I’d like to try. I think we’re ready.”
He was only twenty-seven. She was only twenty-four.
“I’m not ready,” said Salo.
Johanna canceled the appointment and went back to not telling her husband that she wasn’t doing a single thing to not get pregnant.
Another two years passed.
She became increasingly, privately, intractably frantic.
“Bobby and Christina are pregnant again,” she told him one morning as he was looking through his briefcase for some elusive bit of paper.
“Oh?” said Salo. “There it is. I knew I picked it up off my desk, but I couldn’t remember what I did with it.”
“Are you still not ready? Because I am ready for you to be ready.”
“Ready for what?” he actually said. He was snapping the latches of the briefcase. It was burgundy, made of eel skin, the one she had picked out to replace the Big Brown Bag.
“To have children, Salo. I would like to. I think we would be such wonderful parents.”
This was not precisely true. She was full of apprehension when she thought about him as a parent.
“Well, sure. But why is this so important right now?” he said.
Why? Because each individual cell in her body was howling at her, every day, all day, incessantly. Because she walked through their house on the Esplanade imagining children into the empty bedrooms. Because even their dog, a standoffish dachshund named Jürgen, seemed to understand he was only a placeholder for something vastly more significant that might at any moment replace him.
“I’m concerned that something is wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong. We’re not even trying to get pregnant.”
Three years was a long time. She had different priorities now.
“I thought it would take a while, so I went off the pill,” she said.
Salo frowned. “And when was that?”
That, said Johanna, doing a rapid calculation in which she omitted the first year of unilaterally not trying to not get pregnant, was two years ago.
After a long moment, he said: “I see.”
So this time they made it to the famous infertility doctor, Lorenz Pritchard of Fifth Avenue and Lenox Hill (“and Georgica Pond,” Salo would later joke, “courtesy of me”).
“We’ll see you and your partner on the fourteenth, at four p.m.,” said the receptionist.
Dr. Pritchard’s office was papered with photographs of infants, smiling and drooling infants, infants in color and black-and-white. Johanna shielded her eyes against the glare of these children as she went inside. She took a seat on the leather banquette, eyed the vat of pink ranunculi, and began filling out forms on the clipboard. Height. Weight. Sexual history. Sexual habits. Drug use. There was no end to what she was being asked to reveal.
Beside her on the banquette, Salo was frowning over his own form.
“I don’t see what my choice of underwear has to do with your not becoming pregnant.”
“Really?” Her heart jumped. Underwear? Could this all be solved by … underwear?
“Or how many drinks per week.”
“I have that one, too,” she said.
“Do you have the underwear question?”
Johanna looked. “No. But I have lots of lovely questions about my period and venereal disease.”
“Oh, I’ve got venereal disease here,” Salo said. “You know, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong. We probably need some hormone shot or something.”
The “we” was a nice gesture, and she appreciated it, but she was careful not to look at him. She had been educating herself on these matters for over three years, reading every magazine article and every New York Times Science Section update on the new fertility frontiers, and she highly doubted that a simple hormone shot would be the end or even the beginning of things. She had a strong suspicion that they were—or she was—about to commence a long slide down a steep slope of increasingly uncomfortable and frightening interventions, from the aforementioned hormone shots (hers, not his) all the way to the brave new worlds of surrogacy and test tube babies. She had, in her head, a whole list of possible diagnoses, ranked from least to most fearful: a blockage was preferable to a hormonal dysfunction. Hormonal dysfunction was preferable to absent or unviable eggs, which weren’t as bad as insufficient sperm, which was better than an incompetent uterus. Of all the things she worried might be wrong, the one Johanna feared the most was “unexplained infertility.”
“What if there’s nothing wrong?” she asked, whispering.
“There is nothing wrong,” he answered.
Dr. Lorenz Pritchard was a big guy who seemed to be spilling out everywhere: hair from the sides (but not the top) of his head, flesh at the waist and wrists and neck. He was waiting for them at a long antique desk, covered with files and legal pads and a small plate on which remained the corner of a tuna-fish sandwich on rye and a crumpled napkin.
“Dr. Pritchard,” he said, extending a faintly fishy hand. They both shook it.
“I read about you in New York magazine,” Johanna blurted.
“Okay. Which year? We’re so much further along than we were, even a few years ago.”
“Well, good,” said Johanna, forcing a smile. She knew exactly what he was referencing, of course. The test tube baby, Louise something, was two years old, and that was long enough for an entire genre of TV movies to have been written, produced, aired, and seen by herself. There was a story in Ladies’ Home Journal about a couple who’d paid a woman to be pregnant with the husband’s child, and then the woman had just handed over the baby to the father and his wife after it was born. They all seemed happy about it, but it sounded horrible to Johanna. She wanted to be pregnant with her own baby. And anyway, what if the mother—the other mother—decided she wanted to keep the child after it was born? What then? It wasn’t as if you had King Solomon on hand to settle things.
“I’m afraid there’s something wrong with me,” Johanna said. Then she started to cry.
Dr. Pritchard, to his credit, took this in stride. He’d been a perennial in New York magazine’s “Best Doctors” issue as long as Johanna had been checking. He had seen crying women before.
“Mrs. Oppenheimer,” he said, passing her the Kleenex, “I have treated over five hundred couples, the vast majority of whom are now parents, some several times over. Sometimes nature doesn’t go our way, and that will always be true, but I can promise you that everyone in our office is here to support you on your infertility journey.”
Even in the depths of her embarrassment, our mother found room to despise the term.
Salo reached for another Kleenex and passed it to her.
“So, you got yourselves here, and that’s the first step. Also the hardest.”
A blatant lie, as Johanna would later be the first to say. A ridiculous lie. Getting herself and Salo into an office where his underwear and her menstrual cycles could be scrutinized had certainly not been fun, but it wasn’t by any measure harder than some of what lay ahead. From the hormonal testing to the early-morning sperm analysis to the Clomid prescription she walked out with that very first day (a drug that made her even more weepy, crazy, and scared than before), to the hysterosalpingogram, which Dr. Pritchard’s radiologist herself referred to (just seconds before actually performing the procedure) as “having your tubes blown out.” It was all terrible, fearful, and degrading.
And useless. Another year of months passed, in rage and depression, so much blood through the cervix, so many filaments of hope gone forever. Her brother Bobby’s third child, a boy, was born. Her father had a mild stroke and retired from the Lawrenceville school, shortly after which he and Johanna’s mother sold their house and moved out to live nearer their favorite child and his growing brood.
It was with these first (official) steps of her infertility journey that Johanna felt the strong embrace of her husband’s money for the very first time. In the midst of her great and ambient distress it was at least good to know that they could pay for whatever interventions Dr. Lorenz Pritchard felt like tossing their way, especially since they were both still young, and there were, as he was forever telling them, always new protocols and procedures coming down the pike. “Whatever we need,” Salo had told her, before they even got home from that first appointment. “Whatever it takes.”
What it ended up taking was the next four years of their lives, beginning with the vindication of Salo’s sperm, and moving on to the “blowing out” of Johanna’s fallopian tubes not once but three times (she could not be ignorant of the extreme unpleasantness of this procedure after the first time, sadly), and four rounds of doctor-assisted insemination and six of hormone-assisted egg production, extraction, fertilization, implantation, and ultimate disintegration.
It was in Dr. Pritchard’s office, during the postmortem on this sixth go-round, that the dreaded S-word was first mentioned.
“I don’t want to do that,” said Johanna, between sobs.
“It is my recommendation,” said Dr. Pritchard. “At least that you explore the possibility. You two are not having a problem producing viable embryos, but they are not surviving the transfer. I’ve had many patients who have been able to work around this impasse by means of a surrogate. You might have to ask yourself, do I want to be pregnant or do I want my children to be born so that we can be a family?”
Salo, she noticed, was silent. Was he asking himself the question or was he wondering what his wife actually wanted?
“Oh, of course. The latter. I know, but it’s hard to give up.”
“You’ve done everything, Johanna.” At some point after year two, she had become “Johanna” and Salo “Salo.” “Above and beyond, I would say.”
“Me, too,” said Salo. “I mean …”
“One more,” Joanna said sharply. “Okay?” She blew her nose and attempted some humor. “One more, for the road. And then yes, I promise. I’ll do it.”
And so it was back to the injections and the extractions, and four perfect eggs landed in one of Dr. Pritchard’s petri dishes, the Cradle of Life, as she had privately taken to thinking of them. Those four perfect eggs, fertilized, began to bubble and brew their way into being, as had fully thirteen of their proto-siblings, and when the time came to transfer these precious final quintessences of Oppenheimers, Dr. Pritchard chose three at random to journey on to the dubious destination of their mother’s womb (her much maligned womb) and dispatched the fourth to a freezer in a special facility somewhere in Connecticut, there to wait for the surrogacy they all, even Johanna, expected to ensue.
One more, for the road.
Who knows why it worked, at last and so spectacularly. She’d had the good-news pregnancy test twice before, and once, even, brutally, a stoic little heartbeat, so loudly magnified in Dr. Pritchard’s ultrasound room that it hammered like something out of Edgar Allan Poe, but it was still gone only two weeks later (after she had told everyone, including, in floods of tears, her parents). So when she made her way down that long and terrifying corridor in Dr. Pritchard’s office at the six-week mark, and wiggled up onto that table of torture with its unforgiving crackle of sanitary paper, and pulled up her shirt for Loretta, the Irish sonographer, to goop her abdomen with gel, she had only the barest hold on her own imminent devastation.
One more, for the road.
Technically, three more. Her three final chances for the only thing she had ever made so bold as to request from the universe. But then Loretta, who had been present at every one of those thirteen embryonic failures, and who, moreover, had seen some of the most powerful citizens of the metropolis wail and weep (sometimes in happiness, sometimes in grief), lowered her magic wand over Johanna’s belly and the cacophony of life came thundering through. And not a single thump either, or even a duet, but a crashing, howling trio. Johanna Oppenheimer was, literally, teeming with life.
“Well now,” said Loretta, whose Cavan accent had never shifted, despite forty years in New York. She was grinning at the screen. “You folks, everything you’ve been through. I said a rosary for the Oppenheimers, I don’t mind telling you. I don’t do that for everyone!”
She heard someone say, “Oh wow,” and thought of Andy Warhol, because only a week earlier they’d watched some television program about the artist. He’d stood over a gaggle of assistants as they silk-screened Uncle Sam onto canvas, and said the same thing: Oh wow, oh wow. Now, when she turned her head to look at Salo he himself looked silk-screened, and in a shade of green she had never seen before. Or perhaps it was making him actually, physically ill, the news that he was now—and could never for the rest of his life escape being—somebody’s father. A whole bunch of somebodies, in fact.
4
Triptych
In which Johanna Oppenheimer gestates and Salo Oppenheimer goes further afield
Our mother spent the second half of the pregnancy in bed, allowed up only for careful, increasingly uncomfortable trips to the bathroom and the occasional appointment with the high-risk obstetrician. Hers was an old-fashioned confinement, beginning with heartburn, nausea, and gas, and only getting worse as those babies commenced to mess with her internal organs and the inertia commenced to mess with her head. Downstairs, contractors finished up the house’s “gourmet kitchen” and went clomping up to the fourth floor, where they got started on the nurseries: the two boys in the larger front room (with its stunning view of the harbor, a compensation for having to share), the girl in the back, overlooking Montague Terrace. At six months some offset between elation at her long-desired state and profound discomfort tipped, and she began to find that she did not wake in the mornings to contemplate the pure delight of a new day. She did not wake at all, having failed to sleep during the night, as twelve limbs tangled for position inside her and somebody’s head pounded her bladder without remorse, and fear—deep fear—coursed through her exhausted body.
The goal was to get to eight months, but eight months undulated before her like a hula dancer in a desert mirage—so far, so unreachably far. Seven and a half months felt just as impossible. Seven months was a daydream, like someday, somehow, loping toward the ribbon at the New York Marathon. She couldn’t lie on her left side, where one of the boys sojourned head down, or on her right for fear the girl might be crushed under her brothers. She wasn’t allowed to stand except when walking, carefully, to the bathroom. That left sitting up in bed or lying flat on her back, two positions she alternated throughout the day and night.
Our aunt Debbie came once a week or so after work, and our grandmother on Saturdays. One of Johanna’s Skidmore friends was a nanny in Park Slope for a couple of novelists; she visited a few times, telling stories about her employers’ pretensions, and their dinner parties with other novelists (and their pretensions), but hanging out with an immobile and hugely pregnant woman wasn’t a scintillating activity for a nanny’s single day off, so Johanna wasn’t surprised when those visits petered out. Mainly it was just our mother and Gloria de Angelis, the housekeeper she and our father had hired when the high-risk obstetrician told her to hit the mattress, and the dog, Jürgen (who, being low to the ground, did not enjoy the house’s many stairs and preferred to stay on the parlor floor, barking at perceived intruders outside on the Esplanade), and of course Salo, who faithfully came home early and brought dinner upstairs on a tray for both of them: broiled chicken, ravioli, gazpacho, all prepared by Gloria. For nearly four months she stayed where she was, trapped and supine except for those terrifying walks to the bathroom and extremely careful visits to the doctor. Upstairs the workmen clomped and clattered as they readied the two nurseries. She wanted so badly to see the rooms, the curtains and paint color she’d chosen from her bed, the rugs and rocking chairs, the three black-and-white mobiles, which Aunt Debbie insisted had contributed to the genius of her sons, our cousins. But it wasn’t worth the risk of climbing the stairs. And the three of them came closer every deeply uncomfortable day.
Facing the bed was a triptych Salo had traveled to London to buy in an auction. The three paintings were of heads, grotesque and distorted on a dark background, each facing in a different direction, each with features swirling into chaos. Johanna, left alone with it (them) day after day, had moved past her initial alarm and even repulsion toward this painting and into an even more problematic way of looking at it. She had begun to think of those three heads as bad fairy counterparts to the three babies kicking her (and one another) throughout each day and night, the warped faces becoming proxies for her fears—fears that plagued her and which must not be permitted to cross the placenta and attach to her actual children. And what, exactly, were the fears of a woman who had waited so long and tried so hard (and yes, suffered so much) to be in precisely the position she now occupied? Simply this: it had occurred to our mother, almost at the moment of those three cacophonous heartbeats in Dr. Lorenz Pritchard’s ultrasound room, that for all her yearning and despite the years of pills and shots and blown-out fallopian tubes and egg extractions and waiting and failure … she had no idea how to be a parent. None. She knew only, thanks to her own parents, how not to be one. Years of effort, she slowly came to understand, had only pressed her into quicksand, and now here she was, sinking and alone. And what made it worse for her was the fact that our father had found a path of his own—a path he seemed determined to walk without her company and a path she had not recognized soon enough as a path. If only she had, she would have tried harder to understand those squiggles of crayon or the hard blocks of color, or even—though she loathed them—the twisted faces at the foot of her own bed. But it was too late to understand, or even pretend to understand, how these pictures spoke to her husband, and what he heard them say.
