Dating Big Bird (18 page)

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:

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.

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

Hair
texture?

Tanning
ability?

Predominant
hand?

I read on.

Education / Intelligence

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 I didn’t feel like going home to my apartment—full as it was of useless and outdated reading material.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 dis
tracted?
” 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.”

In the weeks following Amy’s breakup with Will, she’d been resolute in her efforts not to sit around waiting for him to come crawling back.

She was dating.

“Dating, dating, dating,” she would say. “I’m a dating machine. Blind dates. Lunch dates. Dinner dates. Drinks. You name it. I’m dating it.”

She certainly was.

Dentists.

Periodontists.

Orthodontists.

Podiatrists.

Real estate lawyers.

Real estate developers.

Developmental psychologists.

Psychopharmacologists.

I tried to be enthusiastic and encouraging about every fix-up (“Yes, I’d agree: Bald is a relative term”; “If he’s six foot nine, there’s a good chance your kids wouldn’t be freakishly
tall”; “No! I
love
men with red hair!”), since getting out was better for her than staying in a relationship that was going nowhere. Just listening to the energy she was expending on each of these dates exhausted me. And I couldn’t help feeling slightly depressed by her fervor—by her desperation, it even seemed sometimes—to meet someone
—any
one—before it was too late.

“Too late for what?” I’d ask when I was feeling particularly contrary. I thought that playing devil’s advocate might disabuse me of the same time-motivated panic to become coupled as soon as possible. But Amy would just look at me and make a face, and I knew that she knew I was fighting the same race against the clock.

I’d been thinking a lot about my own relationship with Malcolm ever since I’d printed out the information from the Internet on sperm banks. Knowing how accessible becoming pregnant could be—how possible it could be—had made me restless and even a bit bold. I knew I had to make a change, but I didn’t want to settle. I didn’t want to give up someone I loved for someone I might not love as much. Or at all.

The truth is, I wanted to ask Malcolm to help me have a baby—surreal, I know, given the context of our relationship. Still, even though he couldn’t sleep with me, and even though he’d been very clear about not wanting to have any more children, and even though he hadn’t ever told me, I believed he loved me. And I knew I loved him.

“Of course you should ask him,” Renee said Sunday afternoon, when I called her at home to see what she thought. It was the tail end of March and unusually warm that day. I’d opened all the windows in my apartment, then pulled a chair over to the living-room windows and brought
the cordless phone with me. As we talked, I put my bare feet up on the sill and closed my eyes and listened to the noise, unmuffled, unblocked by the double-paned glass, drifting up from the street.

Renee and I rarely talked on the phone at home—partly because we saw each other every day all day, which precluded the need to carry over conversations outside the office, and partly too, I think, because she and I had somehow tacitly set the limitations of our friendship long ago: work friends were work friends, no more, no less. As personal as we got at the office—and we certainly did get personal—I don’t think she ever trusted that our friendship would survive, or be relevant, in the outside world.