Dating Big Bird, page 13
“Look, if reality weren’t a consideration, I’d be past the should-I-or-shouldn’t-I part and on to the next stage.”
“Which is what?”
“Which is how. How, out of all the unnatural clinical futuristic scientific petri-dish ways to get pregnant, I would do it.”
“Another reason for you to get rid of that impoholic of yours. So you could possibly get pregnant in a more normal way, like by—”
“Having sex.”
“My point exactly.”
“That’s another conversation.”
“That’s another twenty conversations.”
“Whatever.”
She snorted.
I snorted back.
“Well, to me, the reality question isn’t so complicated,” she said.
“Of course it’s complicated. There’s money. There’s short-term planning and long-term planning. All that stuff.”
Another ten-year-old, this one. She and Amy could form their own life-without-practical-considerations-and-consequences play group without me. I was pragmatic and pessimistic to a fault. I’d learned that from my parents.
“Please. You make plenty of money.”
“But I’d need more money—a lot more—if I had a kid. Clothes and equipment and a bigger place and child care, since I’d have to keep working to pay for it all. Not to mention the cost of artificial insemination itself, if that’s what I end up doing. There’s a lot that would have to be figured out.”
“Okay, fine. So you figure out the money. What else?”
“Well, there’s the whole ethical question. You know, is it right to choose to have a child alone? Is it selfish to condemn a child to having only one parent? To having no father? And if you have a sperm-bank baby, what do you tell it when it gets old enough to want to know who its other parent is? How do you justify the fact that the child will never ever know who the father was, what he looked like, what he sounded or talked like—that there will always be this incomprehensibly huge blank—this missing piece—at the core of its being?” I took a breath and went on. “I mean, there’s no research on this yet,” I continued. “A whole generation of sperm-bank babies hasn’t grown up yet. Who knows what new strains of psychological damage will emerge from this?”
Renee thought a minute before shrugging off my misgivings.
“There are worse things a kid can have to deal with,” she said.
“Oh, really,” I said. “Like what, Dr. Spock?”
“Like abusive parents. Child-beating parents. Alcoholic parents.”
“Infanticidal parents,” I added sarcastically. “Münch-hausen-by-proxy parents. You’re talking about extremes.”
“Okay. Then parents who fight all the time and who make their kids’ lives miserable, like mine did, so that they grow up and never want to get married and never want to have kids because they wouldn’t want their kids to be as miserable as they were.”
“Maybe,” I said. Renee frequently alluded to her own particularly unhappy childhood, only the bare bones of which I knew: an Upper West Side childhood, punctuated by a messy prolonged divorce when she was twelve. Magazine editor father remarries and moves to Princeton, New Jersey, where he starts a new family by having two more children. Renee, her brother Randy, and high-school teacher mother fall on hard times due to their father’s lack of child support payments and move downtown. “End of story,” Renee would always say at that point, so that was all I knew.
“Or absentee parents, like Karen,” she added.
Okay.
True.
“They should have just taken Marissa straight out of the delivery room and put her into therapy so she could get started already, she’s going to be so unbelievably fucked up.” She lit a cigarette and threw the match into my wastebasket.
I watched her blow smoke rings in silence.
“All I’m saying, Ellen, is that if you want something badly enough, you do it, and you let everything else figure itself out. Otherwise you’ll do nothing. And you’ll have nothing.” She stood up and started for the door, but then turned back to me. “And then I’ll really be stuck with you.”
11
There were only eighty-eight shopping days left before Karen’s shower.
Then eighty-seven.
Then eighty-six.
Then eighty-five.
I knew this constant countdown because Simon E-mailed me every day to ensure I had a gift—the perfect gift—ready and wrapped—by May 1.
Eighty-eight days left.
Something deft,
perhaps, to hide her postnatal heft?
Or:
Eighty-six.
Make your picks
While the clock still ticks.
Until I wrote back:
Eighty-four.
Eighty-three.
Eighty-two.
Eighty-one.
E-mail me again
And I’ll get a gun.
It was, however, as Martha Stewart herself would say, “a good thing” that Simon was annoying me every day with his E-mails, otherwise I might never have started looking in earnest, albeit reluctantly, for the baby gift of the century.
After his tenth E-mail, I asked Jennifer to bring in whatever catalogs we received and shelved at the office—Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue—as well as the other mail-order catalogs that carried everything from bedding and maternity clothes and baby clothes to strollers and cribs and toys. Yet after studying them at my desk one afternoon in early February and not seeing anything that was even remotely suitable for Karen, I realized that the only person who would really know what you were supposed to give someone like Karen was Karen.
Or someone in Karen’s fame-and-financial bracket.
To wit, I asked Jennifer to start calling our famous clients’ assistants to find out what their bosses had been given when they’d had their kids. Two days later we went over the results of her telephone survey together in my office.
I sat back in my chair and gummed the end of my pen.
“So what did Jodie get from her friends when she had Charles?” I asked, figuring I’d start with the Pregnancies of Unknown Origins first.
Jennifer scanned her pad. She looked like a miniature Karen with her fudge-colored bob and her drapey black KLNY separates and that look in her eye—hunger. Sometimes I even thought I’d caught her hiding her ass as she walked through the office, but I was probably just imagining it. She was young and full of ambition, and for her Karen was the ultimate success story. Jennifer idolized her, wanted to be her, and really believed—on some level, I was certain—that she could be her. When I’d interviewed her for the job a year ago and asked her where she saw herself in five years (stupid question, I know, but I couldn’t resist), she said this: “Being Karen.” I’d had to stop myself from laughing out loud at the egregious entitlement in her voice—from leaning across my desk and cackling that she’d be lucky to still have a job in the business in five years. That people like Karen didn’t become what they were by accident, or by some errant stroke of luck. They became who they were because they had some spark of genius that shot them up into the universe and separated them from the masses down below. Jennifer didn’t have that spark, and neither, I’d realized long ago, did I. And while I had never seen myself as “being Karen,” I had longed desperately to be something more than I was; to do something more than I was doing today, trying to track down what baby gifts famous women had gotten from their famous friends.
“Jodie Foster got … flowers, and … lots of baby clothes,” Jennifer reported. “Some really cute things, her assistant said, from agnès b.”
“What about Rosie O’Donnell?” I asked, moving into the Single Women Who Adopt category.
“Rosie got … the same, basically. Baby clothes, mostly.”
“And Michelle Pfeiffer?” I asked, sticking to adoptive mothers.
“Again, baby clothes. Petit Bateau. Dries Van Noten. Paul Smith. And she also got a lot of skin care items.”
“Skin care items? For her?” She didn’t even give birth, not that that would have had anything to do with a need for skin care items.
“No, for her daughter.”
I was totally confused. “What do you mean? Like foundation and powder and blush?”
Jennifer finally laughed a little, though whenever she did, I always felt like she was laughing at me instead of with me, since I suspected she thought I was odd in the same ways Karen thought I was odd.
“No. Not makeup. Skin stuff. From Kiehl’s. Crabtree & Evelyn. And Bulgari.”
“Shut up,” I said. “Bulgari makes baby lotion?”
“That’s what Diego said.” She checked her pad once more just to be sure.
I shook my head in disgust and told Jennifer she could leave, and should leave—as in go home—since it was well after seven o’clock by then. Except for a few of the most tortured assistants, almost everyone had left—an early night, actually, by KLNY standards.
Once she’d gone, I looked out the window at the cold dark winter sky. Malcolm was teaching and wouldn’t be home till late anyway, so I turned off my office lights and sat down at the computer.
I figured I would surf around on the Internet to see if I could get some new brilliant idea about a gift for Karen, but when the keywords rocking horse and beanbag chairs yielded nothing interesting, I tried piggy banks and then stuffed animals.
I started scrolling down the screen.
Animals: Veterinary Medicine:
Veterinarians and Clinics
*Northwest Valley Veterinary Hospital and Canine Semen Bank—A to Z about services and canine artificial insemination.
Why all the veterinary references? I wondered, before scrolling up and realizing that I’d forgotten to modify animals with stuffed. I scrolled back down and continued reading:
Health: Reproductive Health: Infertility *Cryos International Sperm Bank Ltd.–specializing in the worldwide delivery of high quality tested donor semen.
Health: Reproduction: Infertility:
Clinics and Practices
*UCSF IVF Program–Provides infertility services, including IVF, GIFT, ZIFT, ovum donor, ICSI, embryo and semen cryo-preservation, donor sperm bank, and male infertility (in California).
My palms started to itch as my hands hovered about the keyboard, waiting to hit the scroll button every time I read a line of text. I swallowed and blinked, amazed and thrilled and, to be frank, a little horrified, by what I’d just stumbled onto.
Health: Cultures and Groups: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual:
*Rainbow Flag Health Services–donor sperm bank serving the gay and lesbian community.
Health: Care Providers: Clinics and Practices: Reproductive
*Repository–sperm bank. Long-term storage for frozen sperm and embryos.
Host uterus.
Ovary freezing.
Egg banking.
Frozen embryo transfer cycles.
Cryo-preservation.
Micro Sort sperm separation.
I mean, I knew you could shop for things on the Internet, but I’d never imagined shopping in cyberspace for space-age cryogenics services.
I went back a few screens and then clicked on Cryogenesis. I scanned their main menu, then clicked on Selecting a sperm donor. One of the options was View a Sample Donor Profile.
A Sample Donor Profile?
I couldn’t click fast enough.
Sperm Donor Profile #1049
General Description
First Name: Christopher
State: California
Age: 25
Race: Caucasian
Maternal Ethnic
Ancestry: German
Paternal Ethnic
Ancestry: German
Height: 6′2″
Weight: 185
Hair Color: Brown & blond
Hair Texture: Straight
Eye Color: Green
Physical Build: Medium
Complexion: Light
Tanning Ability: Tans easily
Predominant Hand: Right
Teeth: Excellent
Vision: 20/20
Hearing: Normal
Distinguishing
Characteristics: Dimples on cheeks.
Small cleft chin.
Citizenship: USA
Native Tongue: English
Religion: Christian
Practicing: No
Birth Date: 02/69
Blood Type: O negative
Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual
Marital Status: Single
Smoker: No
Hair texture?
Tanning ability?
Predominant hand?
I read on.
Education / Intelligence
Education: BS/BA
High School Grade
Point Average: 3.75
College Grade
Point Average: 3.5
College Major: PoliSci/Econ
SAT Score: 1355
Bullshit his combined SAT scores were 1355. But then I remembered.
This was only a Sample (read: made-up) Donor Profile.
I went on and read how he described himself:
… Secure … sensitive … innovative … creative … competitive … respectful … comedic … optimistic …
Optimistic? Surely he was from a different gene pool from me. Which was a positive thing.
… Future goals: Entertainment lawyer; filmmaker.
Was this a sperm bank or a computer dating service?
Whichever it was, I didn’t just want to order this guy’s sperm. I wanted to marry him.
And then, finally, the pièce de résistance:
The sample donor’s photo.
Blond. Green eyes. Square jaw. Aquiline nose.
Okay. So this was a dating service. And he was the bait.
By the time I’d gotten to the sample sperm donor’s photo, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t feel like going home to my apartment—full as it was of useless and outdated reading material. And I didn’t think I could handle seeing Malcolm, since all I’d want to do was tell him about everything I’d found on the Internet, and well, that would go over like a lead balloon.
First, I buzzed Renee’s office. When she didn’t answer, I ran down the hallway and saw her door was closed and that she’d left for the day. So then I called Amy and told her about what I’d printed out.
“Did you know that you can access sperm donor profiles on the Web? All you have to do is enter a credit card to browse the entire data bank of donors, which I didn’t do yet, of course. But they had a sample profile. And the donor profiles have pictures! Pictures!”
I stood up from my desk and started pacing around my office, the phone cord stretched taut.
“Not that I’m sure I would even do any of this,” I continued, “but one of the things that’s always made me queasy about sperm banks, among other things, was not knowing what the guy looked like. I just couldn’t imagine how you’d have a child, and as it grew up, you’d look at it and think, Well, that’s not my nose. And That’s not my hair. And you’d have no idea who the hell’s they were.”
Amy was quiet.
“I’m sorry. Am I boring you?” I asked sarcastically. I felt like I’d been enthusing into a big black hole.
“No. I was just distracted.”
I slumped back into my chair.
“I just stumbled onto the most amazing find in cyberspace—just the shot in the arm we’ve been waiting for—and you’re distracted?” I paused. “May I ask by what?”
“I just broke up with Will.”
I jumped in a taxi and was at her apartment about seven minutes after we’d hung up. Once inside, I sat on her couch, breathless and sweating and with my nose running from the cold.
“Speak,” I said.
She shrugged as if nothing seismic had occurred.
“I broke up with him. That’s basically the long and short of it.”
She certainly was unpredictable. Just when I’d thought everything was under control with the no-birth-control incident, she suddenly breaks up with her boyfriend out of the blue.
“I know. You said that already. But why tonight? What happened?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while, you know. I told you that. And then tonight we had a drink, and he told me he wants to take a year off from writing his thesis and from me to go to Wyoming where a friend of his lives and think about everything, and well, I lost it.” She shook her head in disgust and disbelief. “I mean, Jesus, taking a year off from doing nothing. How unbelievable is that?”
Pretty unbelievable.
I’d agreed with Malcolm that her relationship with Will wasn’t going to work out, but I’d never thought it would unravel like this—him literally getting more “space,” and her being brave enough to end it before it devolved any further.
“So how do you feel?”
“Feel?” She repeated the word as if she had no idea what it meant. “I don’t really feel anything right now. I’m just numb. And beaten. And completely demoralized. To have someone be so ambivalent about you that he has to get away for a year to think about whether he wants to be with you—it’s like—please. I’ve had it. I think I’ve finally had it.” She fell momentarily speechless. “I’m not doing this again.”
“Doing what again?”
“Getting involved with a guy who has so many issues about being a couple. Next time—if there is a next time, which, at this point, I doubt there ever will be—I’m going to force myself to find someone less complicated. They might not be as interesting and I might not be as interested in them, but fuck interesting. At least it won’t be a total waste of time, like this was.”
She started to cry then, and I felt helpless, not knowing what I could say to make her feel better and not wanting to say anything that could possibly make her feel worse.
“Do you think there’s a chance he’ll—”
“A chance he’ll change? That he’ll call me tomorrow, or next week, or the week after, and tell me how stupid he was to let me go and how he can’t live without me and that he’ll beg me to take him back?” Tears streamed down her face, and she tried to wipe them away with the palms of her hands. “No. I wish he would. I’d give anything for him to do that. But I know he won’t. He’s not ready for any of this. I don’t know when he’ll be ready, but I know it won’t be anytime soon. And I can’t wait that long.”
