Perfect Life

by Jessica Shattuck

  And then he had “forgotten.” The sample of sperm he had provided had been split into vials by some masked and white-gloved worker, spun and separated, and shipped off to the cryobank’s frozen chambers, where the sperm would wait the requisite time to be tested and declared HIV-free. If it took, the fertility clinic would send him a notification; this was the one term he had insisted on. Otherwise he had signed all rights away, including the right to make himself known to the child. This, the grave, damp-faced clinic lawyer had explained, was unusual. There was no binding legal precedent. He had raised his eyebrows significantly, inviting Neil to press further, but Neil had no interest. He understood what Jenny wanted. And at the time he wanted nothing more than to oblige. The clinic itself was clearly skeptical that it would come to anything, with only one sample.

  The months passed and Neil immersed himself in the feverish, disorienting netherworld of Underdog, an eerily addictive first-person shooter he was reviewing for GameQuarter, and, alternately, into the research project that was his real passion: writing a biography of Albert Sorenson Jones, a mid-nineteenth century explorer of Africa whom Neil had discovered in the course of his now-abandoned dissertation work. All thoughts of those small vials of sperm disappeared under the consuming obsessions of his everyday life.

  Until suddenly, improbably enough—a thin envelope from the Pacific Fertility Center arrived, bearing tidings that a child of his had been born into the world.

  Part Two

  1

  BACKING HER OLD VOLVO into a litter-strewn space in front of her house, Elise Farber felt the sweet rush of relief and anticipation that homecoming evoked in her—this was joy, wasn’t it? The delight in burrowing back into this cozy little hole in the universe that was truly her own. She did not take this for granted. It was a rare and lucky thing. She knew this not just theoretically, but absolutely from her life before Chrissy, which in comparison had been lived on a flat and desolate stretch of firmament, with no cracks, no openings to find foothold. Here, in the cozy three-bedroom house on Cottage Street that she and Chrissy had bought four years ago, she had learned what it meant to have a haven—not just a place of respite but a place of restoration. She loved coming home.

  As soon as she opened the door, the cat, Calliope, pressed out past her legs and James, the bolder of her two boys, cackled with delight, throwing his chubby arms up in the air.

  “Have you been chasing Calli again?” Elise asked, bending down and scooping him up. He laughed harder and kicked his small legs against her middle—his new mobility was as urgent and addictive as a drug. He could not be contained. She set him back down.

  From the kitchen came the reassuring, reasonable sound of Diane Rehm on NPR, and the rich smell of Chrissy’s signature braised pork with prunes.

  “Hi!” Chrissy called, clattering something on the stove. “Did you pick up the wine?”

  The wine? A cloud moved over Elise. She had forgotten. Not just the wine, but the reason she was supposed to get it. Claire Markowitz and her child, the fellow sibling of Donor #176, were coming over for dinner.

  “I’ll go get it right now, I’m sorry—”

  “No, no. It’s fine. I found some, actually—in the basement.”

  Elise slipped off her shoes and rounded the corner into the kitchen, where Chrissy stood poised over a steaming Dutch oven. She wore an apron over her khakis and polo shirt, and her thick dark blond hair was loose around her shoulders. Everything about Chrissy was round—her face, her breasts, her belly—even her elbows managed somehow to be round rather than angular: it was one of the things Elise loved. Her lack of sharpness. She was the cozy, comfortable mother Elise had never had, in the tedious, dampening language of talk therapy. Elise could see this, but it was not all.

  She kissed Chrissy’s hot ear, trying to tamp down the sense of dismay rising in her. She had promised to put a good face on for the night.

  Chrissy had discovered Claire Markowitz on the Internet—she was a woman who had been inseminated with the sperm of the same man Chrissy had. Which made her son the half-sibling of Nigel and James, one of the eleven(!) children sired by the apparently prolific—and robust—outputs of this half-Jewish, half-Colombian donor with the almost perfect verbal SAT score that Elise and Chrissy had spent so long deciding on. Elise was not particularly curious about Claire Markowitz, or her son, or any of the other families Chrissy’s research had turned up. In fact, she was instinctively repulsed by the whole idea of the Donor Sibling Registry. She found its name repugnant: as if the children of sperm donors were animals to be registered and assigned numbers. But Chrissy had been determined to join, and to ferret out information from it, and then to email this woman, Claire Markowitz, who apparently lived not more than ten miles away, in Lexington. To what end? Elise had teased her. Tonight, apparently, was the answer.

  “Where’s Nigel?” Elise asked, noticing him as she said it. He was sitting on the floor behind the counter amid a florid pool of toys, happily chewing the tail of a stuffed dog. Unlike his brother, he had not yet begun to toddle around.

  “Hi, bear,” she said, squatting down beside him and sinking her face into his silky, baby-smelling hair, an act that he rewarded with one of his big, delighted smiles. Sweet Nigel, Elise felt a swell of appreciation for him. More than James, Nigel seemed to accept Elise as a close second, if not equal, to Chrissy. He was a little slower and less independent than his brother, and from the start more of his care had been left to Elise. She had cuddled him in their queen-sized bed, and fed him bottles, because unlike his brother, he did not unequivocally reject anything but his mother’s breast. But this was not to say he didn’t prefer the comfort of his mother’s milk, his mother’s smell, and touch, and voice—all the innate biological markers that attached him to Chrissy, and not Elise.

  “All right,” Elise said, rising and resigning herself to the night, “I’ll go get changed. Do you need the table set?”

  “That would be great,” Chrissy said, with a look of appreciation and—was it apology?—in her eyes.

  As she was pulling on her sweater upstairs, the phone rang.

  “Colin had a fever,” Jenny said into Elise’s ear, almost before she had said hello. “That’s why he was such a mess at the christening. I hope everyone doesn’t just think he’s a whiny, fussy baby.”

  “Of course not,” Elise said. “Poor little guy.” She glanced at her watch—she could not afford to get sucked into a call with Jenny right now.

  “You know he’s not usually like that,” Jenny said.

  “I know. But he wasn’t being so—”

  “Ugh. He was awful!”

  “He wasn’t. But what would it even matter if he was? Babies get fussy,” Elise said impatiently.

  “I know, but he doesn’t. Usually.”

  “I know, but Jen? I can’t—”

  “I just have to find a way to let all those church-board bitches know what a prince he really is,” Jenny interrupted.

  Elise laughed, although she knew that in fact Jenny was half serious.

  “I can’t talk right now—we have guests coming.” As soon as she said it she realized she didn’t want to tell Jenny about Claire Markowitz. And with this realization came a clutch of uneasiness. Why didn’t she want to tell Jenny? Why did the fact of this woman make her feel in some odd way ashamed?

  “Oh? Who’s coming?”

  Elise hesitated. “No one,” she said briskly. “Just some woman Chrissy knows. Can I call you tomorrow?”

  “Of course!” Jenny said brightly. “Just spread the word.”

  “The word?” Elise repeated blankly.

  “About Colin!”

  Despite herself, Elise smiled. “You are completely crazy, you know.”

  Jenny gave a gleeful hoot of laughter. “Not crazy—careful.”

  When Elise answered the door, the woman standing on the steps was older and more bohemian than she had imagined her to be. She had long, frizzy hair loose around her shoulders and a sort of
caf-tanish jacket of nondescript ethnicity. Her eyes were big and slightly buggy, but sorrowful.

  But Elise didn’t take any of this in at first. Her eyes went straight to the child she was holding. Who had the same dark hair, dark eyes, and funny little adult nose as James and Nigel.

  “Welcome,” Elise said, extending her hand in the slightly jocular way she tended to use when she was uncomfortable.

  “Thank you.” The woman smiled nervously. “You must be Chrissy.”

  “Elise,” she corrected, as Nigel crawled around the corner and grinned up at their visitors happily.

  “Wow!” the woman exclaimed, staring at him. “This is totally—Wow.”

  Elise scooped Nigel up, tongue-tied. And for a moment there was nothing but the sound of a car alarm beeping on the street.

  “Justin—” Claire looked to her son, who was staring from Elise to Nigel impassively, “this is…is it Nigel or James?”

  “Nigel,” Elise said, blowing on his chubby belly to make him squeal.

  “Nigel,” Claire Markowitz repeated. “Amazing.” And she bent to deposit her son on the ground.

  “No, no, no! I don’t want to get down!” the boy shrieked in a surprisingly loud and unpleasant voice. He was how old—three and a half? Four? This was an age Elise knew nothing about. It looked intimidating.

  Chrissy bustled out from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. She looked flushed and rosy with excitement, especially pretty. Watching her, Elise felt a kind of pride—Chrissy was so appealing! And so natural! Immediately she made the boy feel comfortable, made him smile and slide down off his mother’s hip and allow himself to be led into the kitchen holding Chrissy’s hand. But there was something else Elise felt too: a stab of jealousy. Chrissy shared something with this woman—a total stranger—that she and Elise did not. They had borne the same man’s children, for almost nine months they had lived with this same stranger’s multiplying DNA.

  “Oh, it smells delicious!” Claire was exclaiming. “Are you a good cook? I can’t do anything in the kitchen. Justin and I just live on Whole Foods prepared stuff, don’t we?” She smiled manically at Justin, who was careening a toy train around the playroom, much to the twins’ wide-eyed amazement.

  “It’s actually pretty good, though,” she continued defensively. “I mean, it’s not full of preservatives or anything—it’s all good organic ingredients.”

  “Oh, we love Whole Foods,” Chrissy offered supportively.

  “It’s really important that Justin get a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables for his health, you know—and we have to stay away from wheat because of his allergies. I don’t know how we’d do that without Whole Foods. What did people used to do?”

  She was a skittish woman—her whole body emanated an anxious unsureness. But Chrissy, who usually had little tolerance for this sort of person, did not seem at all bothered. She shook her head soothingly and offered Claire wine and helped direct Justin to the bathroom. Elise herself felt utterly tongue-tied.

  “So I’ve been telling Justin that he and Nigel and James all have the same daddy, right?” Claire chirped in a jarringly loud voice, when Justin emerged from the potty. “Wait—did you wash your hands? Always make sure you wash your hands after wee wee. Can you reach the sink?” She hustled her son back into the bathroom. “Oh, good—there’s a stool, look, just the right size for you.”

  Chrissy looked over at Elise and smiled. The smile was content, not conspiratorial. She was in a magnanimous mood. Elise tried to absorb some of her partner’s evenness rather than be irritated by it. She tried, genuinely, not to care that Claire Markowitz had just shouted something about the boys all having “the same ‘daddy.’”

  “What sort of work do you do?” Elise asked when Claire and Justin emerged from the bathroom. This was both to wrest the subject away and to break her own silence before it gathered enough steam to render her mute, something that had been known to happen.

  “Oh, I work at the Stadner Institute,” Claire sniffed, apparently disappointed by this switch of topics. “I’m the research program director.”

  “Ah.” Elise nodded, waiting for more, but apparently this was to be it.

  There was a little squeal as Justin snatched a toy from James.

  “And you’re a scientist?” Claire continued. “Is that right? Sorry, do you mind…?” she slid the bottle of wine toward herself and refilled her glass.

  “Mm-hm.” Elise nodded, the gloomy prospect of explanation in front of her. She was a biochemist who worked in a transgenics lab. And she was not one of those scientists who loved making their work come alive for the layperson. She did not revel in breaking it down into simple, elegant metaphors and terms. What she did was transfer genes from one species into another to achieve specific outcomes: currently she was transferring genes from humans to goats. The bald, shocking explanation of it either made people recoil in horror, or light up with a million questions, all new and fascinating to them, but not to her.

  But Claire Markowitz was not, actually, remotely interested. “Do the boys go to day care? Or have a sitter?” She asked, sipping her newly refilled wine glass.

  “They’re home with me,” Chrissy said, sliding the pork out of the oven.

  “Oh, how wonderful that you have the time for that…I wish there was some way for me to work less—I mean, not that I don’t love my job…” Claire burbled on.

  The idea that they would have to spend another at-least two hours with this woman seemed suddenly oppressive. Elise took a sip of her own wine and sat down on the floor beside James.

  There were a few things she remembered about Claire Markowitz from the research Chrissy had acquired Googling her. She had graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1984 and from the UMass School of Social Work fifteen years later. She was the owner of a basset hound, who apparently ate some sort of very fancy raw-meat dog food that was delivered—this was how the information had cropped up online—weekly. She also had some hypochondriachal-sounding syndrome called Raynaud’s phenomenon and was a contributor to the Circulatory Disorders Journal, although, Chrissy had reported cheerily, her contributions to it dated back to before the time she would have conceived Justin. You found all that out online? Elise had asked Chrissy, incredulous. Elise was apparently living in the Stone Age of Internet use.

  Watching Chrissy nodding along to Claire’s monologue, murmuring appropriate queries and assents, Elise felt distance opening up between them. The fascination with Claire and the donor siblings was unlike anything that had arisen between them before. She understood Chrissy. And Chrissy understood her. It was one of the great beauties of their life together, this rare and sustaining feeling of being known.

  But she did not understand this. She did not know what it felt like to bear Donor #176’s children. She did not know, even, what it felt like to be a mother. Chrissy rejected this. Of course you do, she said. You and I are both Nigel and James’s mother. But this was false, and Chrissy knew it. Didn’t her desire to connect with Claire and her son prove this?

  Dinner was chaotic. Justin did not like pork. He did not like prunes. He did not like rice, or broccoli, or cheese, or the kind of yogurt “with pictures on it” that Nigel and James would slurp up by the gallon if given half a chance. And Claire was neither strict with him nor go-with-the-flow about his dinner: yes, maybe a few chicken nuggets would do the trick (they didn’t), or maybe some of that lentil soup Chrissy offered to defrost (ditto), or, sure, if it wasn’t too much trouble, steaming some carrots and edamame might be a good idea. Nigel and James, who were voracious eaters, looked on with wonder and pounced on Justin’s rejected foods whenever they could reach them. Meanwhile, it was getting late. Elise had to be up at five-thirty tomorrow morning to get to work before the lab meeting. And the boys would be loopy with exhaustion all day if they didn’t get to bed soon.

  But Claire wanted to talk about the long and winding path that had led her to the sperm bank (an early, unhappy marriage, a slew of loser boy
friends, a sojourn in the Peace Corps in Guatemala), and the “almost spiritual” event that had ultimately deposited her there. (She had been looking through her baby pictures with her mother…) She asked almost nothing of Elise and Chrissy, assuming, perhaps rightly, that the decision for them had been more obvious.

  Justin had retired from the table and the wasteland of untasted edibles at his place, and sat on the floor dismantling the twisty-limbed baby doll Chrissy had bought for the boys as a nod toward gender neutrality. It was not a popular toy. But all the same Elise felt protective of it.

  “Oops,” she said, picking its head and trunk up and leaving Justin brandishing one leg. “I think that dolly might need her legs.” It was the first thing she had uttered in some time and the sound of her voice seemed to startle them all.

  “Justin!” Claire exclaimed. “That’s not a nice thing to do to that doll!”

  Nigel began to cry.

  “Oh, no! I’m so sorry—I’ve talked your ear off. We have to let these poor people get to bed,” she said, addressing the pouting Justin, toward whom Elise was developing a pronounced dislike.

  And they began the slow process of departure—jackets and cell phone and handbag found, dump truck “borrowed,” kisses and hugs bestowed. Claire Markowitz seemed to have penetrated deep into the marrow of the house.