The Paternity Test (5 page)

“Medical screening, fine,” said Stu. “To look out for diseases. But
psychological
? We want to have a baby, is all.
Our
baby. I don’t see what else you need to know.”
Whap!
went his palm against the desk.

As Linda sputtered an answer (“. . . responsibility to all parties . . .”), I pressed my shoe on Stu’s, silently trying to tame him but hinting also at “Thanks, my sweet” and “You and me, together.” Again: my love–hate romance with his temper.

But now that Stu was irked, we’d never get much further. I spun the monitor away. “How much, total?”

“As you know,” Linda said, “we’re committed to transparency, but it depends on which plan you select. In light of your situation? Ballpark figure, including all the medical and insurance costs? I’d say a hundred-ten, hundred-twenty thousand.”

Transparency, indeed. I felt I had my nose pressed to inch-thick glass at Tiffany’s, glimpsing jewels I never could afford.

Thing was, we’d never seen a clear-cut dollar figure. All our research sources seemed to tiptoe ’round the numbers—probably for the reason we’d avoided asking Zack and Glenn exactly what they’d spent to make Milo: Didn’t it seem crude to put a price on someone’s head?

But now we knew, and the number was a problem-solving slap. We’d have to find a surro on our own.

Also now resolved was a question that had vexed us: whether to go “traditional” or “gestational.” A TS—traditional surro—would offer up her own egg, would be the baby’s biological mother, as opposed to a GS, who’d incubate a fetus that would grow from a separate donor’s egg. We’d known there were extra costs in using a separate donor, but not how many till seeing Linda’s spreadsheet. A GS and donor would cost us fifty, maybe sixty grand above a TS who’d use her own egg.

There were other compelling reasons to take the TS option. For one thing, two women meant two tiers of complication. We’d obviously grow close—we’d
have
to—with the carrier, but we both also felt the need to know the genetic mom, beyond just some data on a checklist: to hear her laugh, to look into her eyes. Wouldn’t it be simpler, less baffling to the child, to have those two mothers be the same? Another thing: I’d come across a medical-journal item. “Fatal Cancer in an Egg Donor: The Risks of Ovarian Stimulation.” A donor and a GS both would go through hormone treatments; how could we justify risking their lives in order to make our new one, especially when a safer way existed?

But philosophy didn’t pay the bills, and wasn’t what decided us. Our choice, in the end, came down to cash.

Which is how we wound up at Surromoms, an online meeting point for all things surro.

The site was one of those twenty-first-century rabbit holes: type the name, hit Return, and
poof!
—a new dimension. Initially what you saw was a soothing pastel palette, the online equivalent of soft focus. Then, if you clicked the links (FAQ, Contracts), a fair bit of the now-expected alliterative annoyance—tiny treasures! blessed birth mothers!—but also tons of no-B.S. advice. How to get insurance. How to tell your family. How to deal with worried, jealous spouses.

Stu and I clicked “Classifieds,” which featured ads from surros and from couples who intended to be parents (IPs, in Surrospeak, a patois we now practiced; Stu and I, more narrowly, were IFs: Intended Fathers). Some of the surros were pros, their postings full of stats: “I ovulate on day 12, meaning that if doing IUI, CD 11 is best.” Others were almost lyrical in their folksy unrefinement: “I hope to hear from parents who want the bad as much as the good. I mean, who doesn’t love it when their kid pukes down their shirt?!”

Stu, till I stopped him, actually started to draw a chart of all the various choices in the mix: surros who’d breastfeed and surros who’d pump; those who’d travel or wouldn’t; and, most crucially, women who’d work with gay men or refused. (More than half the ads began with “Seeking a Christian family . . .”)

But one thing, above all else, took me by surprise.

I’d supposed this would be a sellers’ market, and that the surros, in charge of supply, would drive some hard bargains. The parents, I thought—the please-God-make-us-parents—would be desperate. And sure, they were (
we
were), but equally so were the surros: stricken, almost sickened, with a need.

“I’m not working with an agency because most of them won’t take me for my age. But I promise, my body’s not even close to being done . . .”

“I’m large, but now losing weight. I didn’t have gestational diabetes when pregnant before, and if I’m blessed to carry your child, I’ll only eat what’s healthy . . .”

Their need wasn’t money, at least not primarily: the fees went as low as fifteen thousand. But what if all these women had a kind of psychic poverty? How, then, would we
not
take advantage?

Maybe this uneasiness explained my twinging heart. For, despite my pleasure as our choices got more real—the ads like a magician’s proffered deck:
Pick a card
—despite this, I’d battled a dark mood. (Because Stu had labored to be ready and un-nervous, to prove that he wouldn’t get cold feet, I did not admit that I—the gung-ho one—was spooked. Besides, how would I talk about a gloom so sly and nameless?) Was I stung by the Christianist ads, the paucity of gay-friendly ones? Perhaps a little. But really, one good ad was all we needed. Still, my spine felt made of glass. Why?

It wasn’t till the next night that I put my finger on it. Stu and I were searching again, hunched at the computer, scrolling through the multitude of ads. “No,” he said. “Definitely not. Maybe. Maybe. Nope.” His sheeps-from-goats assessments sounded cold, a little snobbish. Just as bad—worse?—his twitchy note of thrill when he flagged an ad that caught his full attention. “Ooh.
Yes!
She’s—look. She’s willing to do TS . . .”
Rat-tat-tat
, he ruled the mouse with the hoggish, quick adeptness of a coke addict razor-cutting lines.

I saw it, then. The face I’d never seen, his online hook-up face: this was how he’d looked when he surfed Manhunt.

How did I know? I knew. I just knew.

And even now—especially now—I felt a nervous pinch.

Lots of the surros seemed lovely, but none struck us as . . . ours. Of those willing to work with gay IPs, just one was Jewish. She lived on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle.

The obvious step? We had to place an ad.

This was tougher than it sounded. Should we be ultra-serious? Was drollness disallowed? Better to seem employer-like (“Seeking to fill position . . .”), or bid for buddy-buddyness (“Dear Surro!”)? The challenge was what pulled me from the brink of my old doubts with Stu, not least because it launched him into flights of spousal praise: “Who else has an actual
writer
writing up his ad? Poet laureate of the Personals. My ringer!” The way to this writer’s heart was through his ego.

Here was the ad I managed to come up with:

Women did, in droves. Almost all well-meaning. But no one even close to our requirements.

I’m not Jewish, but . . .

Although I live in Qatar, I . . .

Then there were the out-and-out kooks: one intended to surro as material for a memoir (would we object if she used our real names?); another wanted her fee to be paid in OJ futures.

Truthfully, though, I liked the loons. They let us let off steam. Think of all the tales, I said, we’d someday tell our kid. Stu said maybe
I
should write a memoir.

“
Two Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
?” I offered. “
Daddies Queerest
?”

I don’t think we let ourselves admit how discomposed we were, till finally our first likely prospect surfaced. (Strange, how you could bear aloft your stacked-up load of hopelessness, but one small hope, on top, made it tumble.) This was maybe a couple of months before we found Debora. The woman was a postdoc in genetics, up at Harvard, and came from a storied old Jewish clan in Cleveland: synagogue founders, symphony benefactors. In photos she was preppily appealing. Her button nose, she warned us in a winningly humble e-mail, was Figure 19-B in
Rhinoplasty: The Art and the Science
—“No kidding, by Eugene Tardy; look it up!”—but vanity hadn’t provoked the fix: she’d been in a scooter accident, and needed the nose rebuilt for proper breathing. Her point? That the nose we’d see on her was not hereditary. “My offspring can expect,” she wrote, “a more Hebraic honker.”

Stu and I, discussing her, never used her name; always it was Our Lady of the Womb. The promise of her practically unzipped us. We drove up to Cambridge for a meeting in her lab, and on the way we both could not stop crying. I would start, and Stu would say, “C’mon, now, this is a
good
day,” but then his voice would crack, his eyes would water up—lord, what a couple of sobby queens! Twice I had to grab the wheel and ask, “Want me to drive?”

But that was nothing compared to how we were the whole way home.

Our Lady had integrity: she’d come clean pretty quickly—ten, fifteen minutes into the meeting. Completely under control, she swore. Took her meds religiously. But once, back in college: in-patient at McLean. Her mother, too, had once attempted to take her own life.

We both tried our best to smile. I said something along the lines of “Your candor speaks quite well of you,” but I was sure Our Lady saw our instant airtight judgment.

“The jury’s out on how much it’s inheritable,” she said, flushing. “Listen, it’s the kind of thing I study, okay? Trust me?”

“Well,” said Stu. “I hear you, yeah. We’ll call.”

And we were gone.

Driving back, I saw what looked like ambulances ahead, but it was only the taillights of the traffic in the distance, swirling through the prism of my tears. All the disappointment I’d been stuffing down and stuffing down now surged up like sickness in my throat. I was also sickened by our necessary ruthlessness. Angry, too, but mostly at myself. “Dumb,” I said. “Ridiculous. I let myself believe that she might—”

“No,” said Stu. “Me too. What were we thinking?”

Our ad expired, and we re-upped, and then re-upped again. Three long months of Surromoms, and not a single lead worth pursuing.

The Cape went into shedding mode—the summer folks had fled— cattails on the roadside gone to fluff for wrens to ravage, air as dry as the husks of Indian corn on neighbors’ doors. Normally I loved this time: the clarity, the quiet, the spice of Concord grapes as they fermented on the vine. But now, as I walked the grape-strewn woods around our place, I smelled a world of sweet, spoiled potential.

Zack and Glenn kept clouting us with sympathetic e-mails. “Worthwhile things can
take
a while.” “Keep trying.” “Don’t lose hope.” Their faith made me think about the Democratic convention, a few months before, up in Boston: the crowd, hoisting Kerry signs, cried, “Hope is on the way!” But now had come the wet November night when we were kneecapped: Bush was reelected; he’d plague us four more years. Where was hope now? Bottom of the ocean.

Rina and Richard stayed with us, en route to a Deer Isle wedding.

Stu and I were happy that his sister was finally married, after what had been a trying search. (The furniture conservator at MoMA? No, too pouty. The underwriter? Nice but uninspired.) Finally, three years ago, she’d met Richard Feinberg, against whom she couldn’t seem to make objections stick. Richard had worked briefly after college on a kibbutz, and still seemed to have a pilgrim’s self-approving glow. He was observant—more so than Rina or her parents, but not to a lunatic extreme: ate at any restaurant, drove his car on the Sabbath. He was a manager at . . . I could never focus on the details. A firm that processed some sort of data? “Basically,” he’d told us over dinner when we met, “what I do is make sure that the little guys, below me, don’t p.o. the higher-ups, you know?”

“Isn’t he a gas?” said Rina. “Oh, his funny talking! Too modest to tell the truth, aren’t you?”

And though, to be honest, he often made my eyes ache, this visit, I decided, was successful: a Scrabble game, sans tantrums, out on the deck at dusk; a pot roast Richard praised as “magnifique”; and, over breakfast, a pleasant-enough chat that avoided talk of politics or God.

Even so, there wasn’t any getting around the sadness.

“Half our savings, basically,” said Richard, chewing his toast. “Because, you know, insurance only covered certain procedures.”

Rina said, “You wouldn’t believe the number of fucking lab tests. And hormone treatments. And third and fourth opinions. All of that, and never an inch closer.”

“Sis,” said Stu, “I’m sorry.” He kissed the back of her hand.

I could see how painfully her pain entered into him. Not that he and she made a perfect sibling blend (more like oil and vinegar, whisked by fate together, that tended toward de-emulsification), but who else understood the weight of being Walter Nadler’s child? Who else helped to cut that load in half ?

Richard said, “I can’t bear to watch her suffer through this. And so, no more.
Fini
. We give up.”

Yes, I wanted to say. I know just how you feel.

But Stu gave me a look:
Don’t you dare
.

The thing was, we hadn’t told his family of our plans. In fact, we had told almost no one. Confiding in Joseph, of course, hadn’t gone so well. Marcie, when I’d shared the news, had offered a hearty “Wow!” that sounded supportive but wasn’t necessarily. (“Will kids fit Stu’s . . . lifestyle?” she asked later.) Zack and Glenn were really the only friends to fully back us, and so, for now, Stu had decreed that we should keep things quiet.